About the Course

Is Lesson 20 Life's Most Important Lesson?


"My open heart heals relationships!"

Show me someone who holds onto a relationship fear and I'll show you someone who will create a relationship problem. This course teaches me that fear is the root of all relationship problems. But fear can be eliminated. Spiritual teachers have forever said perfect love casts out all fear.

So.... If I open up my heart way, way out to the far reaches of the universe ... and if my heart stays open....

That's right. It is possible to have a problem-free relationship and it is possible to heal any relationship.

The question is: how do I get my heart wide, wide, wide, wide open?

Do I do it with intellectual study?

Boy, if that were possible intellectuals would be the ones to learn from. But how long has it been since I've seen a truly, supremely happy intellectual? Never?

When it comes to heart opening, I might learn better from little children, true or false?

Anyway, it turns out that heart opening is possible but heart opening requires giving up intellectually derived conclusions. It requires, as Jesus once said, becoming as a little child. It requires being at peace, being happy, and giving of oneself. It requires wanting to be in love every moment.

Wanting to be in love every moment? Wait a minute! What about all those situations when I don't want to be in love?

That's the problem. The ego does not want me to love. It wants me to fear. It wants me to be angry. It wants me to judge. It wants me to feel guilt. It wants a hundred and one other things, but heaven forbid that I love all the time.

Sorry, heaven won't forbid constant love. Heaven nudges me toward constant love. It is the ego that wants to forbid love, isn't it?

So this course teaches heart opening, and the most important factor in heart opening is the intense desire to be in love all the time, without ever a lapse into anything other than love.

How is this accomplished? By constantly being in-touch with my inner desire for love and by constant vigilance against non-love. Nothing I can't train myself to accomplish.

This week each day as I awaken I want to reaffirm my training goal. I state to myself many times over, until it begins to feel very true for me, a statement of intent such as:

"Nothing today can have me closing my heart. Today my heart opens more than ever before."

Then throughout the day whenever my mind is not occupied with other matters I look around me at anything and everything and say in my mind the statement:

"My heart is open to you. I love you _________."

There might be a temptation to responded to this exercise by replying, "I might be able to say 'I love you' to trees. But to rocks and telephone poles and jerks? I don't think I can do it."

That's the problem with thinking. The truth is I can do it and I will learn to do it. I just have to get past my ego's resistance to loving.

The idea with this exercise is to keep this statement in my mind all the time ready to come to the forefront ... like a screen saver on a computer, when I'm not focusing on other things my "screen saver" statement comes right back to mind:

"My heart is open to you. I love you _________."

With this exercise I want to say I love you to trees, rocks, telephone poles, even jerks ... it doesn't matter. I say it to everything and everybody. If my ego tells me this or that object is not worthy of love, I say "Get thee behind me, ego!" and go on loving. The ego could argue all day that something or somebody is not worthy of love, but the point is I am worthy of having my heart open. If I find I'm not satisfied with loving after one week, I can always go back to withholding love.

Finally, at the end of each day this week I want to spend some time dwelling on the fact that my love casts fear out of my relationships and brings healing. I also want to remember how my love heals not only my relationship, but all relationships because we are all in this together. Any healing heals all.

With this in mind my sleep will be happy and just before falling to sleep I might say to myself a few times something like:

"I've opened my heart to heal ALL relationships!"







Also available free of charge online:
Course in Political Miracles

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