My experience with the ACIM Workbook Lessons

04 Dec 2013 Comments Off on I Think You’re Beautiful

I Think You’re Beautiful

A few weeks ago I ran into a local Korean deli for a late afternoon snack. It was my usual place, owned and operated by an elderly, hard-working, not-overly-friendly husband and wife team.

As I stood on line at the sandwhich counter, a man queued up behind me. He looked a little rough around the edges, but that’s not unusual in New York City. We stood there waiting and he smiled at me. The New Yorker in me said, “Don’t encourage him,” but my Inner Smile burst forth spontaneously.

Then the deli man handed me my sandwich and I went to get a bottle of water.

Lo and behold, me and Mr. Rough-Around-the-Edges bumped into each other once more at the cash register. He smiled again and this time said, “You’re beautiful.”

I easily could have taken this for a line, a come on, a rude intrusion. But my Libran nature, I admit, has always welcomed compliments, and instead of ignoring him, “Thank you,” I said, “You’re beautiful, too.” I hadn’t expected “You’re beautiful, too” to pop out.

It could have been a big mistake to tell a strange man he was beautiful, inviting all kinds of misunderstanding and an unwelcome escalation of sexual advances, but he was quite surprised. Maybe even more surprised than I was. There was a slowing down of time, a holy instant pause of quiet beauty as Love hung in the air between us.

Then, unexpectedly, the chronically grumpy wife behind the cash register, piped up in a thick Korean accent, “You don’t tell me I’m beautiful!” She had a little smile on her face.

“You are beautiful,” the rough-around-the-edges guy said sincerely. “I just don’t want to get your husband angry!”

In response to his comment, her smile broadened. Then, as she took my money, she looked me in the eye and said, “You are beautiful.”

The Love was contagious. “You’re beautiful!” I replied enthusiastically.

We all burst out laughing from sheer happiness!

A Course in Miracles teaches that, “There are no strangers in God’s creation,” and the Holy Spirit “sees no strangers; only dearly loved and loving friends.”

The moral of the story? Dare to say nice things to strangers. And receive the nice things they say to you. You will heal exponentially, and miracles will ripple throughout the world.

by Amy Torres in Spiritual Psychotherapy, Thoughts on A Course in Miracles, Undoing the Ego, Unlearning Classroom Tags: My experience with the ACIM Workbook Lessons, Spiritual Psychotherapy

02 Aug 2013 Comments Off on How to Deal with Your Worst Moments, Especially When They Seem to Go On Forever

How to Deal with Your Worst Moments, Especially When They Seem to Go On Forever

What makes a “worst moment”? It boils down to pain. Pain can be physical (sensation), emotional (loss, helplessness, despair), or psychological (fear). Much more common than a “worst moment” is the dread of a worst moment. I call this “futurizing.”

When pain is unbearable we pass out (literally black out, go unconscious) or check out (this ranges from not hearing people talking to us to having a psychotic break — losing touch with worldly reality). This level of pain is rare, and this reaction is relatively rare. When you relentlessly worry about and imagine upcoming pain, you’re futurizing. You’re not living – you’re holding your breath, walking on eggshells, and dreading what the future will bring even though it is highly unlikely.

“The worst thing you’ll ever have to face in life is a thought, a sensation, a feeling, a sound, a smell, happening in THIS moment,” says spiritual teacher Jeff Foster.

When you actually take a look at your pain, rather than avoid it or try to deaden it, pain breaks out into thoughts, sensations, feelings, sounds, smells, tastes, sights–anything the five senses have to offer.

Is your pain unbearable right now? If it was, you couldn’t be reading this essay.

Moment by moment, pain, be it physical, emotional, or psychological, is not only bearable, but potentially the moment when your perception shifts and you realize what seemed to be “the worst” was actually the opening you had been waiting for.

Peace comes when you realize that you’ve been making yourself god by taking your fears seriously. Fears that the pain you have now will never stop, fears that you’ll never meet someone and have a family, fears that you’ll never get a good job (or you’ll lose the job you have), fears that you won’t be able to pay the bills, fears that you’ll never realize your potential, fears that your health will fail and you won’t be able to take care of yourself and those you love, fears that you’ll be at the mercy of unkind people, or people who are incompetent, fears that you can’t overcome your addictions. Fears, fears, fears. It’s best to get well-acquainted with your own, so that you can stop futurizing and choose to enter the present moment.

This moment, now, is where peace is.

There’s an opening, a holy instant, where time dissolves into timelessness, and the “you” you thought you were melts away. Here lies freedom. And this moment is available right now. Feel it? There’s no time like the present to recognize what you really are. Turn your attention to Truth. You don’t have to know how. You don’t have to do anything. Just stop playing god, and instead, “… spend a quiet moment opening your mind to His correction, and His love”* now.

You may also find The Challenge of Physical Pain and Disability a useful read.

*A Course in Miracles, Workbook for Students, Lesson 126

by Amy Torres in Spiritual Psychotherapy, Thoughts on A Course in Miracles, Uncategorized, Undoing the Ego, Unlearning Classroom Tags: My experience with the ACIM Workbook Lessons, Spiritual Psychotherapy

28 Jul 2013 Comments Off on Special Relationships

Special Relationships

“Everyone on earth has formed special relationships, and although this is not so in Heaven, the Holy Spirit knows how to bring a touch of Heaven to them here.” (T-15.V.8:1)

A Course in Miracles students are often very afraid that their special relationships will be torn from them if they put ACIM principles into practice. Or they mistakenly believe they are supposed to stop having special relationships and, finding this impossible, beat themselves up for continuing to relate to certain people in their lives as special and more important than others. Rest assured that Jesus will neither tear away your special relationships, nor expect you to give them up. All he asks is that we give our belief in special relationships to the Holy Spirit.

“Bring, then, all forms of suffering to Him Who knows that every one is like the rest. He sees no differences where none exists, and He will teach you how each one is caused.” (T-27.VIII.12:1-2)

When we unconsciously believe in specialness, which is the source of the “life” we lead, we project that belief outward, and are convinced there are people in a world ruled by a cruel ego-god. Even if we have a poor opinion of ourselves, even if we are atheists, even if we are obviously the innocent victims of other people’s viciousness, we are still unconsciously subscribing to the tiny, mad idea that we are special–different from God and from our brothers.

“Specialness is the idea of sin* made real.” (T-24.II.3:1)

We start on the personal level, looking within the ego self we think we are, working with what seems to be our individual sense of sin and guilt (even if it seems the “other guy” is guilty–not us). Little by little, as we learn to practice forgiveness, and clear the guilt from our personal relationships, we discover there is nothing personal to forgive. First it seems as though we draw our projections back into our personal selves, like a spider devouring its own web. This leads to a miraculous shift in perception and we realize that “I” is one ego mind, all-inclusive of every single brother in the whole wide world.

“And you will understand that miracles reflect this simple statement, ‘I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo.’” (T-27.VIII.11:6)

This “I” is the original thought of separation itself–what we now call “ego.” The “undoing” is a change of mind from believing in specialness (that we could leave God’s Mind to be “my self”) to a gentle laugh at the absurdity of such an impossible idea. And here are all special relationships left behind, not with grief and mourning, but with joy and liberation from a false identity that bred only war, slaughter, and revenge.

“We had a wish that God would fail to have the Son whom He created for Himself. We wanted God to change Himself, and be what we would make of Him. And we believed that our insane desires were the truth. Now we are glad that this is all undone, and we no longer think illusions true. The memory of God is shimmering across the wide horizons of our minds. A moment more, and it will rise again. A moment more, and we who are God’s Sons are safely home, where He would have us be.” (W-pII.Intro.9:1-7)

heaven horizon

* “Sin” in A Course in Miracles means the belief in separation and serves the ego brilliantly in that the ego views sin as an unforgiveable crime to be punished. The Holy Spirit disarms the ego’s purpose for sin by reframing sin as a mistake, a mere error to be corrected and healed with unconditional Love. Thus, we release the ego’s plan for salvation (sin, guilt and fear; kill or be killed) and embrace God’s plan for salvation instead (Sameness, Innocence and Unity; Love and Be Loved).

by Amy Torres in Spiritual Psychotherapy, Thoughts on A Course in Miracles, Undoing the Ego, Unlearning Classroom Tags: My experience with the ACIM Workbook Lessons, Spiritual Psychotherapy

17 Jul 2013 Comments Off on Forgiveness is Illusion that is Answer to the Rest

Forgiveness is Illusion that is Answer to the Rest

“Condemn and you are made a prisoner. Forgive and you are freed. Such is the law that rules perception. It is not a law that knowledge understands, for freedom is a part of knowledge. To condemn is thus impossible in truth. What seems to be its influence and its effects have not occurred at all. Yet must we deal with them a while as if they had. Illusion makes illusion. Except one. Forgiveness is illusion that is answer to the rest.” ~from Lesson 198: Only my condemnation injures me.

What does this passage from Lesson 198 mean?

A Course in Miracles is using the word “condemn” to mean that we have chosen to believe a tiny, mad idea that we could separate from God’s Mind. God’s Mind is our Home. We were born there, and we live there right now. It is possible to daydream nightmares in Heaven, and once upon a time we had a thought that we could leave the Formless, Changeless, Perfect, Abstract Mind of God and be God ourself.* It was an idea that couldn’t be taken seriously because that would be like wishing to be human while extracting our own DNA–not gonna happen.

Anway, we went ahead and “remembered not to laugh” as the Course puts it, and believed our fantasy that we had separated from God’s Mind. In order to talk ourselves into this idea of splitting off and being an autonomous god, we had to divorce ourself from Infinity and Eternity. So we made up space and time. This was simply to put God out of our mind … or, more accurately, to become mindless about the fact that we are forever one with God’s Mind.

We tried to forget God and His quality of Unified Oneness (which the Course also calls “knowledge”). We fooled ourself into thinking there was more than one of us. Remember, this is all a game of pretend: if you see it you believe it–if you didn’t know better, an airplane in the sky would seem to be the size of an ant, but that doesn’t make it so! We pretended we were a separate thought from God and projected images out of God’s Mind that seemed real. Then we started a game of war: if I oppose you, that proves there is someone out there, which also disproves the Oneness of God. What a grand distraction!

This sense of being separate from God is called “ego.” The ego came up with the delusional idea that we could fence God’s Oneness off within individual bodies–bodies with senses with which to perceive the world. The perceptions we have seem to be facts–we believe the world happens to us. The Course teaches us we are the dreamer of this illusory dream world.

The Holy Spirit is the memory of God within our minds which we can never lose, just as a human can’t be human without DNA. This memory is restored to us through forgiveness, which the Course defines as recognizing this world, our senses, and the belief that we are separate individuals, is actually a tiny, mad idea–a game of pretend. Since we are so convinced, the Holy Spirit meets us halfway and uses our dream to help us awaken to God’s Truth. Forgiveness uses the medium of illusion to undo our belief in illusion. Forgiveness is the only illusion, within our illusion, which leads to awakening and recognizing what we already are: God’s Child, safe at Home, never alone, always at One with Each Other.

Feel free to ask questions 🙂 Email me at miracles@amytorresacim.com.

* I use “ourself” rather than “ourselves” because there is only one ego mind which seems to be split into all of our individual personal selves–but that, too, is an illusion.

by Amy Torres in Spiritual Psychotherapy, Thoughts on A Course in Miracles, Unlearning Classroom Tags: My experience with the ACIM Workbook Lessons, Spiritual Psychotherapy

21 Jun 2013 Comments Off on How To Find God Through Percussion

How To Find God Through Percussion

More than one student has commented on my measured reading of A Course in Miracles. They say it’s soothing, or grounding, or helps them slow down; they say the reading is unhurried and steady. I attribute that to my dance background. I’ve always had a great love of rhythm and percussion. The melody was always secondary to the beat when it came to my enjoyment of music. Back in the days when I first started attending kirtans,* I heard someone say, “God is in the space between the notes.” Another way of putting it is, “God is in the space between the thoughts.” Is&Amy check

The ego mind uses “splitting” to keep us unaware of God. (Splitting is a psychological term that means dissociating from what’s real because it is too painful or disturbing to tolerate. A Course in Miracles explains that the ego mind uses this device of splitting and dissociating from God to believe it is autonomous–although that is impossible.) Along with splitting comes a racing sensation. In yoga they speak of “monkey mind” which is a ceaseless chatter that keeps us unaware of God’s Stillness which is ever-present.

Many spiritual paths teach that the ego is using the past and future to keep us out of the present moment which is where God resides. The ego seduces us with guilt, fear and worry based on past experience (or even without experience– cautionary stories we’ve been told and swallowed) and projects those fears onto the future nimbly bypassing the present.

A Course in Miracles explains that the ego is actually reviewing the past, which is over and never even happened–the past is actually a delusional state of mind. That’s a juicy subject for another day. For now, suffice it to say, speeding up is a ploy for keeping us from our natural Stillness.

We each have an internal rhythm of our own. My Sufi teachers, Puran and Susanna Bair, say the heart is our signature rhythm, akin to our fingerprint–wholly unique to each of us. When we are able to slow down and focus on ourselves internally, we discover our signature rhythm. Once we’ve done this, we can honor our rhythm by connecting our voice and our breath and our movement to our organic flow.

The more we are loyal and true to our own flow, the calmer life gets. Phones and cars and cyberspace can zip and zoom around and we can remain unshaken. This provides the opening to recognize Spirit.

22178_1229352977280_1332755229_30579231_4122325_n As a yoga teacher, I find this important because it keeps students centered and calm, and keeps the practice balanced as we hold a pose on the right side of the body, and then switch to the left. Many yoga teachers hurry a little and the second side gets short shrift.

Puran Bair taught me to have more impact on the world than the world has on me. He demonstrated the potential in this when he participated in an experiment where he placed his arm in ice while being monitored on medical equipment. Normally the body rejects the arm to save its life. Puran connected with his heart and mindfully sent warmth to his arm–eventually he melted the ice. Pretty impressive. But more important than this sort of feat is the practical application in everyday life of remaining connected with our own internal rhythm so we can be open receptors for God’s Stillness.

Many people believe that God’s Stillness is boring. And that it means doing nothing. But think about it–isn’t music riveting in the moment when all sound stops–just before it kicks in again? Don’t we hold our breath with pleasurable anticipation during that musical pause? Stillness is the Absolute–absolute Peace, Love and Joy … Unified Oneness. As long as we believe we are human, we can choose to apply the wisdom of rhythm to experience the space between the notes.

Musicians might experience this as a unified oneness while they jam. Dancers feel a seamless communion as they dance with a partner, a group, or God Itself, whether the movement is improvisational or choreographed. When doing the Sufi turn (the dance Rumi discovered to heal himself of a broken heart from losing his spiritual teacher, Shams), I feel the Oneness and the Joy of Cosmic Self. Union is natural and reveals itself between the beats–we become One with the Universal Heart.

A Course in Miracles tells me I can change my mind and experience a shift in perception called a “miracle.” One way of making this happen is, like any good percussionist, plugging in to a solid pulse and holding that beat no matter how many other sounds and distractions are around me. I practice this until I can stay the course, hold the rhythm, become constant. In this way I become an open conduit for God’s Rhythm. When that happens, I recognize what I’ve always been–the Source of percussion Itself. zmarmay2013_506_w435_h580

*In Sanskrit, “kirtan” means “to repeat” and is used in devotional services. Live musicians play the harmonium, tamboura and other instruments, and lead chants or mantras (repetition of sacred sounds to facilitate direct connection with God–Om Namah Shivaya is a classic) in a call and response format. Krishna Das is a well-known contemporary Westerner who has embraced this genre, performs regularly, and has recorded many CDs. ACIM Lesson 183. “I call upon God’s Name and on my own” in the reading below, expresses something similar.

Amy Torres is an established spiritual teacher, as well as a Gestalt psychotherapist, interfaith minister, and yoga instructor. A Course in Miracles is the foundation of all her work. To contact her, call 212-340-1201 or email: miracles@amytorresacim.com

by Amy Torres in ACIM Body Image, Spiritual Psychotherapy, Thoughts on A Course in Miracles, Undoing the Ego, Unlearning Classroom Tags: My experience with the ACIM Workbook Lessons, Spiritual Psychotherapy

02 May 2012 Comments Off on The Temple Within

The Temple Within

Darling Beloved,

It has been three months since I have written here, and though I thought of you often, those three months were much needed and well spent. I have been settling into my new home in Florida and working on some health issues that needed to be addressed. I am feeling much better now! I have organized my home and provided myself with a meditation hall/yoga studio. The house is uncluttered, spacious, and filled with the face of Christ.

For a long time I have wanted to maintain better eating habits and in April something called Cleanse America appeared in my email box. Because of how easy and inspiring they made this 10-day raw food cleanse for all of us who participated, and because Scott joined with me for the 10 days, I finally kickstarted a way of eating that has me feeling healthier and freer in my body than ever before. It’s not just the good eating habits. It’s my spiritual practice increasing in me day by day. String together over 20 years of undoing one day at a time and 20 years feels like a holy instant of priceless transformation.

As a result, I would like to share a beautiful vision I keep having with you. The inside of my body keeps appearing to me as levels of an inner temple. It reminds me of Damanhur in Northern Italy. A spiritual center built underground filled with the most beautiful mosaics, meditation alcoves, stained glass and sacred nooks and crannies filled with color, light and sound. Within me, the experience is of one room stacked above another–just as if my chakras were rooms of gorgeous reflective light in jeweled tones of ruby, citrine, emerald, sapphire and diamonds. Rooms revealed through a practice of spring cleaning my internal physiology by using food as medicine.

As the documentary, Forks Over Knives demonstrates, food can be more powerfully healing than medication. Used well, food cleanses the colon, helps the liver and kidneys do their job of detoxification, nourishes us, builds strong bones and muscles, sharpens brain function and removes the sludge and blockages that the ego relies on to keep us in a state of forgetfulness of our God nature.

The vivid clarity with which I’m experiencing my insides being gorgeous rooms filled with kaleidoscopic Light led me to design a new Course in Miracles workshop called, “How to Use the Body While You Think It’s You.” I’ll be presenting this material for the first time at the Who Are You Really? ACIM Conference coming up in June.

Song of Vajra by Nicholas Roerich

The difference between intellectual comprehension and personal experience is the difference between gazing at the beauty of the ocean from the shore and immersing your body in the water. As the Course says, “The prayer of the heart does not really ask for concrete things.” As we learn to use the body for the Holy Spirit’s purpose we experience a Godly state of Mind–we uncover the Love, Peace and Joy within us: The Temple Within. If you would like to go there with me, I would love to share with you in person at the upcoming ACIM conference. Cleveland never looked so good 😉 It should be a lot of fun!

Namaste~
Amy