OVERVIEW
Guilt and shame stem from the belief in separation which generates negative thoughts and behaviors that further perpetuate that sense of separation. By forgiving ourselves and others for perceived wrongdoings, we release the cycle of guilt and shame and open ourselves up to a state of innocence and love. Explore the return to innocence.
TRANSCRIPTION
And today we’re talking about something very light and breezy. We’re gonna talk about shame and guilt. Um, and I’m probably gonna look at my notes this time because it’s been one of those weeks. Have you ever had one of those weeks where like, Amy let me know about this opportunity to speak? And I thought, oh yeah, I can do that. This is actually a perfect week because I don’t have classes this week. And, and there’s some space in my, in my life to be able to focus on this. And then everything else happened. All these other things got in the way. And, and including I had to go to an all day retreat yesterday for work, which I didn’t know I was supposed to go to. And anyway, it was like this, everything was conspiring to get in the way of doing this job this morning.
And I kept recognizing it as my own resistance, my own fear of stepping into this, my own, I wanna call it a kind of guilt or shame around stepping out and being seen. It’s just a different form of it. And, um, and so in prepping for this, I, I did as much as I could. So I’m really gonna just kind of channel, we were talking to Jason about this. I’m just gonna channel my spirit in and through this experience. And it’s kind of interesting because of course the miracles is of course a channeled piece of material. It was channeled through Helen Shukman in 1976 or something like that. And um, and it’s this beautiful teaching. And it’s interesting cuz Helen was actually not a practitioner of the course, even though she channeled it <laugh>. Um, and so I think that what’s interesting about this in the course is that when you do that, channeling your own personality, I think comes through with it.
You know, there’s certain, cuz you have to language it, you have to put it into language and context then syntax that makes sense to you. So I think when I read the course, I see some of Helen’s frames of reference in there. There’s some things that are very biblical. There are a lot of, he, him, his pronouns, meaning everyone, which we see a lot from that time and that era, right? And so I think something like Michael’s book that we’re studying this month is really great because it gives us an insight into this material. It’s material like science of mind where you can read it, but I think you have to read into it, right? And so today we’re going to talk about, um, uh, uh, as I said, this chapter on guilt and shame and how did we get here? Where, where have we been?
So we started with Reverend Amy, um, talking about oneness and this idea of, um, no separation except the separation that we say yes to. Um, we talked, Reverend Darrell came and talked about love and fear. That love begets love and fear begets fear, very science of mind, and also in the course. And then Reverend Rod came and talked about attachments to judgements and grievances and talked about the path of releasing that and being freeing ourselves from that. And it relates very much to this chapter of guilt and shame, right? Because guilt and shame comes out of judgment. Whether it’s solo, I’m doing self-judgment, or it’s in relationship, and then a dynamic with someone else where we are creating that dynamic between us. Um, you should be ashamed of yourself that kind of, you know, foisting it on you. Um, and so, um, in the heart, of course, in miracles, Michael Madad taught, discusses this as a, as a a as a releasing of this, as a returning to innocence.
This idea of a, of innocence being this pure space of this God truth, this love truth, whatever your word is. If God isn’t your word, that’s fine, whatever, source, universe, mother nature, whatever your word is. And so we step into that place of releasing ourselves from that bondage, if you will. And, um, guilt and shame is something that we can experience, as I said, in solo or in relationship. And we hold ourselves in this endless cycle of it. We come into this experience of, um, recrimination of guilt, of shame. And in that experience of it, we, even if we’re doing it as a solo thing, like, oh, I am so ashamed of myself, I feel so guilty about the way I’ve shown up or the way I’ve behaved. We tend to then project it out onto the other people around us. Oh, you’re doing the same thing.
You should be guilty. You should be ashamed too. And we get into this endless dynamic of back and forth of shame, blame, shame, blame. You hurt me. I hurt you. I hurt you, you hurt me. We go in and out of this forever and ever in this endless cycle of, of karmic playing out over this lifetime, multiple lifetimes. It just seems to get us stuck in this place and this sort of low energy of consciousness. We hold ourselves there and we, we, uh, use, um, anesthetizing, um, habits to make ourselves sort of feel good, which are often not good for us. Um, we get into, uh, we get locked into that consciousness of wounding and re wounding, right? And, um, what can happen also is that this space really not only holds us in, but holds everyone around us in as well. We are, we’re just holding this consciousness, this collective consciousness.
And so what’s the way out? How do we get out of this? Well, Michael mired and the course tell us that the path out is through forgiveness. It’s a beautiful, beautiful teaching. And what I like about that is that, um, we can step into this experience of forgiveness and lift ourselves up. If you’ve ever had that experience of being forgiven or forgiving yourself, there’s sort of a lightening up. There’s a, a literal lifting up of the energy, right? When we’re in that shame, blame, guilt, judgment place, it feels like it’s piling on top of us. It feels almost like it’s just kind of pushing us down onto the planet and holding us down and it weighing us down. And this forgiveness just lifts us up. It’s a powerful experience. And, um, and reverend um, Reverend Dar talked about love begets love, forgiveness begets forgiveness. So as we forgive, we receive forgiveness.
It is a reciprocating universe. It’s one of our principles in science of mind. And it shows up in, in, um, course in miracles. It’s sort of interesting how these teachings all sort of interweave and connect together, right? So this idea of reciprocating reciprocation, if I give out, um, judgment, I get back judgment. If I give out forgiveness, I get back forgiveness. It’s powerful. The problem with forgiveness, at least my problem with forgiveness, is that on some level it feels like it can feel like a surrender. It can feel like it doesn’t feel like closure. It doesn’t feel like justice. If someone’s done me wrong. My instinct is to want them to feel the same way I felt to have that same pain, to have that same experience to in some way pay for what they’ve done. And again, in a reciprocating universe, what happens is I end up paying the price myself.
I end up punishing myself. I live in this space of guilt and shame. I’m also living in this space of continual punishment. It can show up as lack. It can show up as sickness, as illness. A lot of times it shows up as illness. We carry this angst, this guilt, this thing in our bodies and our bodies reject it cuz it’s not part of our body. And it develops into illness can show up in our prosperity. It certainly shows up in our relationships. And so this forgiveness, I want it to be something more than, than just saying I forgive you because that can just be about, um, trading one form of suffering for another. Ernest Holmes talks about this, we’re actually gonna read about this this week in, um, in prac training. They’re reading about this, this idea of you’re just being careful not to just swap one form of suffering for another cuz I forgive you.
And then I live in suffering in silence. It’s like, but I’m in forgiveness. It’s actually still holding that energy, holding that consciousness. So what I wanna do is reframe forgiveness as something different. I wanna hold the energy of it differently. And the idea that I came up with, the way I responded to this material is when I think about forgiveness now I think about forgiveness as mercy. It is a mercy, it is merciful to forgive because what I’m doing is breaking the cycle. I’m breaking that karmic dance that we’re in of blame Shane, Gill judgment. I’m breaking out of it. It is merciful. It is merciful for the person. If I’m in rel in a dynamic with someone, it’s merciful for them to help them be free from where they’re at. And it is reciprocated back to me. So it is merciful for myself. It is lifting me up.
I am showing myself this kindness, this mercy, right? It is, it is. Uh, and I know that one of the ways that it can show up is thinking about this in, in context of at least what comes up for me is this idea of yeah, yeah, yeah. But what about the things that are unforgivable? Um, there’s this, uh, wonderful paper that was written by, um, Simon Venal who wrote a story, uh, uh, uh, that he had, um, at the end of World War ii, he was in Germany and, uh, near a hospital or at a hospital. And this nurse came to find him to say, are you Jewish? And he said, yes, I’m Jewish. He said, please come with me. And she took him to this Nazi soldier who was dying. He had requested that she’d go and find someone who was Jewish and he brought Simon to this person.
And, um, this person shared the soldier, shared this story of this horrendous murdering experience that he had with his other soldiers in a town murdering many, many Jews in that town, and was on his deathbed, filled with grief, filled with, um, shame and remorse and asking Simon for forgiveness. And Simon wouldn’t give it. And so later Simon was feeling very guilty about not giving this soldier forgiveness. And he actually wrote this paper and shared it. And it’s somewhat of a well-known philosophical conversation that’s been, that’s happened around this idea. But I’m not gonna get so much into that philosophical conversation, is I wanted to just illustrate this idea of the soldier feeling guilt and shame, Simon being called in and now Simon in guilt. And how we can, how it can show up in us in these dynamics. And that the mercy of it is to say, I do forgive you.
I let that go. And I know that we have this sense of like, I need justice, I need retribution. I need it to be, there needs to be a, someone needs to pay for their crime, so to speak. But I think if we play this out all the way to the end, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. If I forgive you and you’re like, Hey, I got away with it. I’m just gonna act that way again. I think that what happens next is you act out again and you get forgiven again. And in that preponderance of forgiven, that reiteration of forgiveness, maybe it happens once, maybe it happens a hundred times, maybe it happens over multiple lifetimes, but eventually that power of forgiveness is going to have an effect. Because as you’re acting out in this way of creating chaos and, and meanness and being, you know, just not showing up in your best self, those who are doing the forgiving are rising up. This energetic level of rising up our consciousness lifts us up. And so there’s more and more distance that’s formed between the person that’s the doing this, showing up in this energetic, low energetic way, and the people who are saying yes to the forgiveness. And so at some point they’re gonna look around and go, well, I’m all by myself and this is not serving me anymore. So I believe that the power of forgiveness is, it does, um, it does impact, it does have a, um, redeeming effect on anyone, even if they don’t seem to.
And of course it reflects back to us. So our work then is to actualize it in the world of form cuz we’re having this physical experience. So for me, I always find that the spiritual ideas have to play themselves out in some kind of physical way. And so that physical experience, that activity of it is the atonement, is the amendment is the reparation. We do what we can to ask for forgiveness, to seek the forgiveness, to make amends for what we have done. And in that energizing action activity in the human form, it ignites this sense of forgiveness within us.
And, you know, forgiveness and mercy, this idea of mercy, it is never a struggle. It is never a strain. We don’t have to effort it. It comes naturally when we say yes to it because that it’s our natural state. It is that return to innocence. And this idea of it has been around forever. It has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. It has woven in and through our consciousness in 1600 Shakespeare wrote, the quality of mercy is not strained. It drop us from heaven. Like rain upon the place beneath it is twice blessed. It has blessed them that give and them that take. And an earthly powers like as gods, um, earthly powers. Like as gods. When mercy seasons justice, mercy seasoning justice, mercy woven into our sense of justice. It’s been around forever. So nothing new here. It is empowering. It is that which lifts us up.
It is that which redeems us. It is that which brings us back to that state of innocence. We shed this, this, this, this karmic cycle, this karmic energy as Reverend Amy teaches us all the time. Just don’t make other people wrong. Just stop making yourself wrong. Stop making others wrong. It sounds easy and it is. It’s simple. But what is simple, it’s spiritually evolved, is spiritually enlightened. And here’s the thing, if we’re in this dynamic, and we are all the time with this judgment, whether it’s judgment or shame or blame or guilt, someone has to blink first. Someone has to be the one that says, yes, I will do the forgiving. And I think it’s us. I think we are the ones that have to do it. We are the meta physicians. We are the transcendentalists. We’re the ones who know this stuff. We’re the ones who troll in this energy. We’re the ones who have the awareness of our own spiritual power because we are powerful beings. And that power is sourcing this forgiveness is sourcing this mercy that we’re showing ourselves and showing others. So it is up to us. I think we’re the ones who have to bring it into the world. And that’s our action, that’s our activity that action brings us. It’s a return to innocence as Michael writes. And in the book as, um, <laugh>, as Marian Williamson said in her probably most famous book, it is A Return to Love.
Do you wanna say yes to that? I say yes to that. Let’s take this into prayer. Let’s just pray about this. So I just recognize right here, right now that I sit in the center of this loving energy that is everywhere and everyone expressing as all that is in. And then through this life, this love, this joy, this peace in and through me, in and through, in each and every single face that I see here in the room, each and every single soul along line, each and every single person watching this as a recording, I just know the wholeness, the love, the light, the godness of each and every single person. And so from this place, I just say a word. Gratitude for this awareness that we have this power, that we are empowered to be the agent of forgiveness in life. That we can be the, the, the provider, the the sharer, the articulator of mercy for others as we lift them out of this karmic cycle of, uh, uh, of lower consciousness, of blame, shame, guilt, judgment, grievance.
That we rise up above that we say yes to something that is a higher consciousness. We say yes to love. We say yes to being in a higher level, a higher toda being. We say yes to our own innocence. We say yes to this eternal everlasting love. We say yes to being an expression and a consciousness and a holder of this energy that flows in and through and out of us healing and, and, and abiding through. All that is we lift ourselves up and we lift everyone around us, up with us. I say yes to this freedom. This is a freedom that I say yes to. It is expressing and in through me as this bountiful freedom. And it is a healing. It brings healing to my soul, healing to the abundance, healing to the relationships, healing to my body, healing to our body.
I’m so grateful for this. I’m so grateful for the presence and the healing and the understanding of this joy, this love, this mercy that is, I am so grateful for the understanding and the insight and the course that comes through this channeling that has come through to help us understand the path forward to the path to return to innocence, the return to love. I am so grateful for this truth. I’m so grateful for the way it is unfolding here and now knowing that it is presenting itself here today, tomorrow, next week, next year through this lifetime, through the next lifetime. It is so and so. It is.