OVERVIEW
Spring is here with all the rebirth that it brings to the world. This time of year gives us the opportunity to reflect on what needs to be rebirthed in our own lives. It’s easy to blame others for our problems and project our issues onto them, but true growth comes from taking responsibility for ourselves and our experiences. Join us this Sunday in exploring this shift in awareness that leads to renewal and transformation.
TRANSCRIPTION
Thank you Paige and Greg. That was a request from Reverend Amy <laugh>. I love that song. So happy Easter everybody. Many ancient cultures have similar stories about rebirth and there’s one story about the phoenix, a mythical bird, which is said to have the power of immortality. And it’s known for its ability to rise from its own ashes. And according to myth, the phoenix was a sacred bird that lived for 500 years. And at the end of its life, it would build a nest of cinnamon twigs and set it on fire, allowing itself to be consumed by the flame and from the ashes a new phoenix would arise that was reborn and rejuvenated. And we see this symbolism throughout mythology. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Chinese. It was actually in the Old Testament, in the Garden of Eden. I never knew that before. And some call the Phoenix the Firebird because it’s a symbol of renewal and regeneration.
And spring is a time of regeneration. If you went, been out walking around, the daffodils are popping up everywhere. I love that. It reminds me of my mom, but I noticed the birds are singing more, they’re flying around and the world seems to be coming to life again. And of course today is Easter. And for some people they struggle with this tradition of Easter and the traditional story of Easter cuz they’ve, it’s been used to bash people over the head. But let me tell you what new thought says about Easter. Joel Goldsmith, one of my favorite teachers, says that Easter is a symbol of the resurrection of consciousness, the awakening of the Christ’s consciousness within us. So that is that part of ourselves that knows that we are always connected to that which created us. And Goldsmith saw Jesus as the representation of the divine potential when within each of us and his teaching as pointed to the universal truth.
That we are all one with the divine. And that we realize this through our spiritual practice and our inner transformation. So resurrection or rebirth, as I’m gonna call it today, symbolizes the spiritual awakening when we recognize our own true nature as divine beings. And it’s available to everyone. It’s not based on a particular path, but it’s a message of hope and renewal. And it invites us to waken, awaken to that divinity that is within us and to live from a place of love and compassion. And so we’re gonna do a little weave this morning between a course and miracles, which we’ve been talking about and a little bit of Easter rebirth. So, um, we are continuing our study of a course and miracles this week is about projection and responsibility. So we’re gonna explore how we let go of projection and take responsibility for our own life so that we can rebirth our lives from our true nature, as Joel Goldsmith calls it.
So a few definitions, Michael Mead says, projection is the act of unconsciously attributing our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors onto others instead of taking ownership ourselves. So an example might be, if I’m experiencing someone as judgmental, you know, am I actually putting out judgment? And we can really demonstrate that right now in the world with politics, right? We’re in a pretty divisive time, you know, so we might be judging someone who has a different viewpoint than we do because we think they’re judging us or they’re judging what we believe. So that’s what happens when we project and responsibility. The flip side is not about blame or fault finding, but it’s really about taking ownership of our own lives and our own actions. Um, it’s how we begin to realize that we do have the power to create our own reality and to make conscious choices that align with our values and our beliefs. Louise Hay said, blaming is an excellent defense mechanism. It allows us to keep our faults and mistakes at arm’s length. If we can convince ourselves that someone else is to blame, then we can keep the problem from ever touching us.
And projection stems from a belief that we’re separate from God. That’s where it starts. And we, when we believe this, we feel both guilt and we can feel emptiness. We also feel aloneness. That’s what I like about that song that Paige sang to us. You know, I’m used to feeling alone. There’s ways we all feel alone. So we can relate to the separation, can’t we? And we can try to suppress however we’re feeling, but we can only really do that for so long and then it’s gonna come out another way. If we repress how we’re feeling, then it might come out as projection. And the way the projection usually comes out is hurt and anger. And it could even be unconscious, right? It could just be an unconscious reaction. But we’re still responsible for seeing that we’re having a reaction and seeing what we’re projecting and being willing to experience it.
Me dad says, whatever we project, we push away and disown as though it is not part of us. And in a way we’re blaming the other person for our sense of separation. You know, this idea, someone else is to blame for whatever’s happening in my life right now. And it’s self-reinforcing. When we’re living that way, we’re moving into kind of being a victim. And then you get that whole, you know, victim, villain, hero, triangle going. It’s just where the cycle repeats itself. So all human beings tend to attack and judge. And where does that come from? Us in, in us, right? It comes from our own anger. Anger and judgment at ourselves. It starts with us, right? And our sense of separation is actually what we’re trying to heal. You know, our ego tells us stories and we might actually attack to prevent being attacked, right?
I’m gonna go on the defense cuz I’m gonna make darn sure you’re not gonna attack me. And one of the ways we can tell how harshly we’re judging ourselves is to look at how harshly we’re judging other people. That’s a place to look and we can judge to make ourselves feel okay. You know, as I was driving in, I was thinking about this Lizzo song, I actually listened to it a few times and I was thinking about how, you know, she’s really been body shamed, right? And I think most women have either been body shamed or objectified or both. And I started to get pissed. I’m driving in to give a talk and I’m getting pissed. <laugh>, I’m like, this is not good. <laugh>, calm yourself down. But it’s just, you know, it’s really, when I think about it, it’s really anger and shame from my own experiences that I didn’t stand up for myself, right?
On things that happened to me. And I think we all just wanna be seen and accepted as we are. And we could put it, it can be about being a woman, it can be about any other way we might say we’re different. We can feel like we’re another right. And that’s really what we’re trying to heal spiritually. The sense that we’re another, that there’s even an other, and I’m not saying don’t pay attention to anything in the world. We’ll, we’ll get to that because I think as spiritual people, it doesn’t mean we ignore these things, but we can approach them in a different way than just attacking.
So attacker judgment is the first form of projection. We also project guilt. Has anyone in besides me ever done that? Because we can make others feel guilty for either what they did or what they didn’t do right? And sometimes they don’t even know what they did, right? But we’re like, I’m convicting you. You are guilty, right? And so we need to, we need to own that part of us that that behaves in that way and not judge it just to say like, huh, I notice I’m doing this, you know, I need to look at this and I need to take it into my practice to help me shift it. And we also see projection in who we attract in our life, the people we attract in our life. You know, an example Michael gives in the book is we might be attracted to a confident person.
We might find that attractive, but then they end up being a control freak and we blame them for trying to control us. I dated someone for a long time who didn’t really like how he looked very much. And he was always, um, critical of how I looked, right? And even offered to pay for me to have a stomach job done if I couldn’t le lose my stomach. My friends had some choice things to say about that by the way. But I realized I attracted that cuz I didn’t feel good about myself, right? And I allowed it, right? So is that about me or is that about him? That’s about me, right? And so on our path, we have to notice these things that we might have a tendency towards so that we can start to heal it within us, right? You know, I could say the same thing about people attracting people in my life who were unavailable.
You know, I did that for a long time and then I realized I need to be available to myself, right? If I’m, and, and then that shifted it for me, right? To, so that I began to realize like, huh, okay, this is when I’m calling in, I’m calling of inavailability, not unavailability, but it, and the point is not to blame yourself. It’s really about recognizing your pattern and shifting it. Because if you want more in any area of your life, if you wanna have a different experience, you need to rebirth how you’re being, right? You need to embrace a new way of being. And I know on the inside that can feel a little painful when you’re working through it. So I just acknowledge that and just know that you’re held by a community of people. You can get prayer, you can see a practitioner, whatever you’re trying to shift in your life, you’re not doing it by yourself.
That’s why we’re together. So another way we project is anger. And sometimes anger looks like rage, but often it’s subtle. It could just be agitation or annoyance. So we don’t call it anger, right? Mead says all forms of anger have the same origin and goal. The origin being our angst from believing we’re separate from the divine. He calls it God. The goal is to make others feel guilty and responsible for our angst and the anger we’re feeling, making others feel guilty so we can feel innocent. I’m gonna say that again. Making others feel guilty so we can feel innocent. A course in miracles says all anger is nothing more than attempt to make someone else feel guilty. And often underneath our anger is actually fear, right? I’m afraid something’s gonna happen to me, so I’m gonna darn well make sure it doesn’t right? But when we act from anger, we’re actually acting from separation. We’re creating an other out there. And when it happens, can we pause? Can we be responsible? I like the way Victor Frankl talks about it. He says responsible, able to choose your response, right? And that requires us to slow down.
And you know, we talk a lot in our culture today about righteous anger. So this is hard to hold. Like some of the injustice we see in the world with also like spiritually, like, I don’t wanna be activated in anger. And the way that I think about that is, how do I wanna say this? Um, you know, to notice, like I think about Gandhi when I think about this. You know, think about what happened in his country. His, the people, you know, the Indian people were being mistreated and he said, you know, I’m gonna be, you know, for this piece and this different way of being, and I’m gonna do it through resistance, but I’m not gonna do it through violence, right? So I’m not gonna do it from a place where I’m doing harm, but I’m gonna hold my stand, right? My stand for whatever I’m for.
And this, we could talk about this for hours because there’s so many things in the world right now that are up, right? And I know personally I can get super, like I wanna defend people, right? If someone in my life is going through something, my nephew has a son who’s struggling a little with depression and he’s, um, asexual non-romantic, is how he’s identifying. And they live in Texas. And I’m like, I want that child outta that state. You know, because I don’t want anything to happen to him, right? I wanna protect him so we can all, we all have those things that are our triggers. And it’s like, but I have to hold it spiritually, right? And I think about Jesus. It’s funny cuz Michael Mead talks about how Jesus didn’t act in anger. And he uses a story about when he went in and tipped over the cha the tables of the money changers, but he wasn’t acting in anger.
I’m like, I think he might have been a little pissed off when he did that. I do, I think he might have been mad. You know, Jesus was actually a zealot. He was a boat rocker, right? But then what did he do? He would go up onto the mountaintop and he would be with himself and he would pray, right? Because he knew that he needed to go do his work. Same thing about like the betrayal and all of that. You hear stories about him going up to the mountaintop. So wanna go back to our projection of anger onto others for a second. We have a few irrational premises that cause us to project our anger. The first one is we believe we’ve been attacked. The second one is our attack in return is then justified. And then the third one is, we’re no in no way responsible for our attack, right?
So you can see how this cycle would go. And have you ever had it happen where you’re so convinced that someone had an intent that they actually didn’t have that, right? That you go like, boom, right? And then you’re, they’re like, well, you know that that wasn’t my intent. And then you’re like, oh, but like in, in my head, I’m so convinced it was their intent, right? So it’s easy to blame, complain, attack, do all of these things. Eckhart Tulsa says to complain is to al uh, to allow non-acceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Anybody complain besides me? Anyone else notice they’ve ever complained about anything in the last couple days? It is so easy to complain. But what if we just made a decision that we’re not gonna complain? Or if we made a decision to say, I’m gonna catch myself when I’m complaining, right?
What power can you take back for yourself if you instead of complaining, you take a moment to recenter and choose your response. Choose your response. Maybe there’s a conversation that you need to have with someone and our ego tells us that’s an ipo. It’s impossible to be firm with someone else and act with conviction and not be angry. But I really do believe if we do our inner work, we can have a hard conversation. We can act with conviction, but we can do it from a place that’s not angry, right? I think one of our challenges in our country right now is we’re so divisive we can’t even have a conversation, right? And you can’t be in relationship with anybody if you’re not in conversation with them, right? So it’s just an invitation for us to, um, to do our inner work. You know, the other thing is if you mess it up, clean it up, right?
We all make mistakes in our relationships with other people. Just go talk to them. You know, I, I have to out myself here. I had something happen six or seven years ago with a colleague from Vistage who doesn’t live in Chicago. So I rarely see this guy, but he asked me to do a workshop with him at a convention we were having. And he literally would not let me speak. And I had friends in the room, guy friends who are like, we’re gonna punch that guy out for you <laugh>. I’m like, but you know what? Here, this is my part of it. I never talked to him about it. I never said, you know, that did not feel good for me. I felt really dismissed. And so I just came back from a workshop and who does God pair me with this guy? And I’m like, it’s funny cuz I had been praying the morning, I knew I was gonna see him.
I’m like, I think it’s about darn time you let this go, Amy. You know? And then I get paired with him one of the first pairings of the day. I’m like, it’s so funny. But you know, when I sat and talked to him, he was sharing with me sort of like his way of being in the room. I realized talking with him, I’m like, he didn’t do anything to me. Right? He was just so enthusiastic about what we were talking about that he felt he needed to be the one to share it, right? And I’m like, wow, I wasted a lot of time and energy on that, right? Like building a case against him in my head. So I wanna talk about a final form of projection. And we all have masks. And our masks are the things that, the ways that we want to be seen in the world.
And it could be a label we put on ourselves like, Hey, I’m athletic, I’m successful, I’m a professional, I’m healthy, I’m sick. It could be any kind of label, but you know, I I want to invite you to look at the ways you label yourself and to really think about, you know, is it serving you right? Do you have a label about yourself that no longer serves you? And is there a way that you’re projecting a certain way in the world that isn’t serving you? I had a conversation with a young man I’m coaching this week and he was telling me a story and it was about him getting feedback from the board chair where he works and the board chair just kind of like decimated him. And so that’s hurtful, but he got right back up in the guy’s face and told him off.
And I was sitting listening and I thought, well, you know, he thinks he needs to be perfect. You know, this person I saw, he thinks he needs to be perfect. I’m like, when did you decide you had to be perfect? You know? And, and, and so we started to talk about that because I’m not saying the other guy’s behavior was ripe, but there was a belief underneath that he had to defend his own perfection, right? And we all have things like that, right? I have to be good, I have to be perfect. I need to be whatever. So what’s the story that you have underneath whatever the mask is that you’re projecting and how does it serve you? And if it doesn’t serve you anymore, could you let it go? Could you rebirth a freer version of yourself, a self that doesn’t seek out somebody outside of yourself to feel good enough?
Right? A self that already knows you’re enough, that knows you’re special to our song. You know, we can be. So I worked in the corporate year world for years and I sort of have still a quasi corporate sort of thing going on. And people are all about winning. There’s a point chart. We have a point chart in my work. I hate that point chart, but I get obsessed with the point chart, right? And one of my work friends said to me, he goes, you have nothing to prove. Stop it. I’m like, I know that here, I know that, but I still like get triggered by the system I live in. But what if that just really doesn’t serve me? I know it doesn’t serve me because if I wanted to, I could be at the top of the point chart, but I’d have to make trade offs in my life that I don’t wanna make, right?
So just really realizing and owning what’s driving you is my point, right? Like what is, what is unconsciously driving you that you wanna let go of so you can be more free? Our projections come from our core wounds. It could be something that happened to us during our life. It could be trauma. And you know, trauma’s tricky, especially if it was extreme trauma. You know, that’s an area where if, if that’s been your experience, you know, find someone to help you with that. Because energetically we carry everything that’s happened to us, right? And, and, and the invitation is really just like, wow, I am ready to heal this. Bring me whatever I need to heal. Bring me whatever I need to heal. Because our ego, this, all these voices in our head, they conceal our inner light. That’s what they do. They conceal our inner light.
And mere dad doesn’t actually talk about my next point, but I wanna share that you know, other people’s voices in your head. I just wanna really invite you to let them go. Because I know this journey has helped me in this way and I still probably could improve. But when I used to make a decision in my life, I’d have to go check with everyone who would have an opinion. And then I’d be like, well this person thinks this and that person thinks this. And you know, but I didn’t think about, well what is it that I think? Right? And this teaching has really helped me to get in touch with what I’m thinking and feeling. So don’t listen to the voices in your life that are unhelpful and not supportive, whether they’re in your own head or whether it is someone else saying that to you.
There is always someone who will be there to support you, to see what’s possible for you, right? To see hold the bigger picture. That’s what we do together to hold the possibility of transformation, of rebirthing, of having a different experience. And we know in spirit you’re already whole. Perfect and complete that I am presence. That’s what Michael Mead calls it. This higher light, this higher consciousness. He calls it the Christ light is at the core of all of us, which really was a message of Jesus, by the way. You know, you don’t need to go through someone else to connect to the divine. You’re already connected. You just need to recognize it. That was the real message. It got kind of convoluted in the translation, but we don’t need to go through someone else. Whatever it is, you already are part of it. It’s not outside of you. So we move into accepting responsibility as we embrace this, I am presence and begin to take responsibility for what is happening around us. And as we release other people from their responsibility in what’s happening around us, our sense of separation heals and we begin to come back together. So we wanna say no to separation and we wanna say yes to oneness.
Of course, in miracle says the secret of salvation is, but this, that you are doing this unto yourself no matter what the form of attack, this is still true and that’s hard to hear. But from a spiritual view, it’s the truth. You know, we say what you put out comes back to you. So you don’t have to blame yourself if you’re having a bad experience, just recognize you can turn within, you can get some prayer, you can bring this into your practice and it can shift. But your capital s self cannot be harmed. It cannot be injured, it cannot be crucified. That’s actually what I think Jesus proved. They could destroy his body, but they could not destroy his spirit. His spirit is eternal. So our job is to know this truth about ourselves. You know, we’re in this crazy human drama that we live in, right? But the real truth about us is our eternal self. And that’s the self we want to live into. Through our practice, we recognize our true nature. We stopped defending ourselves. We notice what’s going on with us because when we stop defending ourselves and our beliefs, true learning begins. That’s a zen saying.
So we free up our energy to focus on our growth.
So as Connie read to us, for any of us to be referred to as truly committed to our spiritual path, we would have to be fairly consistent and proficient in taking responsibility for everything in our lives, our thoughts, our emotions, our communications, our finances, our actions. We move from the outer to the inner. And we don’t seek without. We don’t seek from without. Transformation is available for you. Rebirth of whatever your experience in I is in life is available to you, but it begins with you turning within and inviting it. So we’re gonna go into prayer now, and I just wanna invite everyone to just close your eyes and I invite, invite you to turn within ah, and just ask your spirit, what do you wanna surrender right now? What do you want to let go of so that you can begin to rebirth a new experience and just ask your spirit to help you in this moment. Spirit helped me to be more open. Spirit helped me to release anger. Spirit helped me to see the truth that is emerging, helped me to see what is possible. So knowing that this divine presence and powers the truth of all, that there is everything that is happening everywhere eternally
Is spirit unfolding. It is love, it is grace, it is goodness, it is wonder. It is birth and rebirth. It is the infinite cycle of life and love. And I know that I am one with this infinite loving grace, this infinite eternal spirit. And as I know this for myself, I know this for each of the people hearing my words, I know that we are all one with these, this eternal goodness of spirit, this presence of love, this presence of grace, this presence of goodness and possibility, this birthing and rebirthing creative energy. So from this place of oneness, I speak a word of transformation for each and every one of us. Knowing that something new is coming forth for us today. Knowing the past is complete and something new is possible, a new story, a new expression, greater life, greater joy, greater peace, greater goodness. I say yes to this on all of our behalf. And I’m so grateful to know this prayer is fulfilled. I’m so grateful to know that the divine spirit that was smart enough to create all of us is smart enough to take care of all of this. I’m so grateful for this, so grateful for the goodness of spirit and the love surrounding us. And with so much gratitude, I simply say, and so it is. Amen.