For years, I really thought there was something wrong with me.

And because I believed this thought, I became very afraid.

Afraid of others – because, God forbid, they might discover that there really is something wrong with me, in which case, they’ll want nothing to do with me, leave me and then I’ll be all alone.

Afraid of sharing – because if there is something wrong with me then there must be something wrong with everything that comes out of me. And if that’s true, then anything I say or share will reveal my fundamental inadequacy.

Afraid of love – because, even then I knew, Love is the Great Opener, and again, I didn’t want to open up because of reasons already stated.

For years…

I engaged in all manners of modifications to my diet, my lifestyle, my envornments, my habits, my beliefs, my work, my relationships, my thinking, and so on. I devoured self-help and spiritual books. All with the hope that somewhere along the line there would be some kind of alchemical change that would occur within me so that I could stop feeling the way I felt.

Little did I know, even though there were great benefits to doing all of that “change work”, none of it actually reached the core of my pain. None of it alleviated my suffering.

It wasn’t until I had a simple, yet profound, insight into the nature of my experience, which happened to be something profound and universal about the human experience itself, that my whole experience of life shifted.

That’s the thing about Insight

One powerful insight can transform the way you see everything – yourself, others, the world, time, space…everything.

The more I saw the implications of this insight, the more something fascinating began to occur: my suffering alleviated by itself.

Not because I was working on trying to get rid of my suffering! That never worked. But because the more I noticed this dynamic within myself, it became apparent that my personal suffering wasn’t even real. It was all made up of the same stuff, one thing and one thing only:

Thought.

The insight that occurred to me one starry, warm night while living on the island of Maui, Hawaii was simply this:

“I’m feeling Thought right now. I’m feeling my ‘right now’ thinking and nothing other than my ‘right now’ thinking. I’m not feeling this situation, I’m feeling my thoughts about it. I’m not feeling my environment, I’m feeling my thoughts about it. I’m always only feeling Thought.”

Now, to me, this realization was the equivalent of being asleep, in a deep dream-state, then waking up only to realize that you were asleep, dreaming and everything you felt in the dream – the fear, the anxiety, the guilt, all of it – was “just a dream.” It wasn’t real.

Like most dreams, once you wake up, you don’t really have to do anything about the dream. It’s over. It’s done.

It was in this moment that I realized, there was genuinely nothing wrong with me.

I just didn’t understand, because nobody told me (mainly because most people aren’t even aware of this) that our moment-to-moment experience is being generated from the inside-out via the power of Thought.

Because of this misunderstanding, like so many of us, I kept looking outside of myself for the cause and the solution to my “problems”.

Turns out, the ‘system’ was already functioning perfectly. Nothing was broken. Therefore, there was nothing to fix. In fact, it became obvious that the more I tried to ‘fix’ something that wasn’t broken, the more I perpetuated the belief in a reality that was only real for as long as I held it in mind!

In other words, the problem itself wasn’t real so how could I fix a problem that didn’t exist?

Yet, for years, that’s exactly what I was attempting to do (and what so many of my clients recognize that they were also doing for years as well).

The key to a profound shift in your experience lies in these simple, yet profound, statements:

We’re all living in the feeling of our ‘right now’ thinking, moment by moment.
We’re only feeling Thought taking form in the moment and not something other than Thought.
Even our thoughts about our feelings not coming from Thought, is Thought.
There’s nothing we can think about that’s not made up of Thought.

To not understand and be aware of this fundamental and universal aspect of the human experience sets us up for a lot of unnecessary suffering, stress, confusion, frustration, and a lot of non-existent causes (and false solutions) for why we feel the way we feel.

There is nothing to fix or do. But there is something to realize and become aware of. And that realization and awareness, changes everything.

With that, I’ll leave you with something to contemplate from the introduction of A Course In Miracles:

Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.

To your joy and freedom,
Joshua

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