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The Gifts of the Spiritual Relationship Counselor Training

by Rev. Jackie Tritt, O.M.C.

I feel guided to share with you about my journey with Pathways course 2010: Spiritual Relationship Counselor Training. When I took this training, I received more than I ever imagined or hoped to expect. It is simply structured, highly intuitive and most importantly, honest. If we are willing, we can bring to Light some of our most profound fears for healing and continual growth.

Participating as a student, I found myself working on my own healing, understanding that I had no desire to be an unhealed healer. While I enjoyed that part of the journey and the necessary reading material brought great insight for my personal growth, the real journey for me began with my first student.

To have someone give you the gift of their trust and confidence, to share their willingness to be so completely honest with where they are on their journey has been nothing short of an honor. It is to experience the oneness, the truth, and the light of the Higher Self. There is healing for both the teacher and the student. The line from A Course in Miracles says it best, “I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal.”

Miracles are happening. If you are a Pathways of Light minister, I invite you to consider taking the Spiritual Relationship Counselor Training. Allow the course work to act as a guide for you to continue to grow and reach out to others, taking you to new heights of compassion and understanding of your relationship with yourself and others.

It is not necessary to be in the “perfect” relationship to begin. You are welcome to come as you are. I have no doubt the gifts you will receive will bring you tears of joy as well.

Rev. Jacqueline Tritt is a Pathways of Light minister who lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

© 2004, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice and website address are included.

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Highlighted Minister — Rev. Nancy Schilli

by Rev. Nancy Schilli, O.M.C.

Starting with this issue of Miracles News, we will be highlighting Pathways of Light ministers and the work they are doing here at the Center in Kiel, Wisconsin or in their communities. We will also explore what they are doing to continue with their practice of stepping back and following the lead of the Holy Spirit. We would like to begin by highlighting Reverend Nancy Schilli.

Q — Since your completion of the ministerial training, what have you done to continue to strengthen your connection with Inner Guidance?

Nancy — I try to remember to ask Holy Spirit about everyday events. I practice stepping back and being led. I practice by asking, “What would you have me do? Where would you have me go? What would you have me say, and to whom?” This helps me to remember to turn to Holy Spirit when things are starting to turn into chaos. I continue to take the 900 courses to understand A Course in Miracles and to help me change my thoughts to return to Truth.

Q — How has strengthening your connection to your Inner Guidance helped you in your daily life?

Nancy — Things run smoother. Situations involving certain folks that used to be frustrating are now pleasant conversations. I’m more joyous. Events that used to get me depressed, now just incur a few seconds of, “Oh My” and then I move on to see things in a different light, a light of learning. I also worry less about how things are going to turn out. I used to worry more about the future. Now I just ask for help in recognizing what my next steps are instead of deciding on my own and let the Holy Spirit take care of the future.

Q — What are some of your experiences regarding changes in your perception as you continue giving all your perceptions to the Holy Spirit to be healed?

Nancy — I am realizing more and more that it is me that is creating my own perception of the world. As I am willing to change the way I think, circumstances actually turn out differently. I turn over to Holy Spirit things I’m concerned about that I don’t understand, and find out that they actually turn out even better than I thought.

I turn over all my worries about my children to Holy Spirit, since Holy Spirit knows lots more than I will ever know about what is best for them at this time.

A recent event helps clarify how Holy Spirit helps me know I’m in the right place. I recently advised Pathways of Light that I wanted to become more involved in whatever way would help them the most. After talking with them, we agreed that I should volunteer to be Treasurer and do the bookkeeping. I live two hours south of Pathways. In the beginning, I was driving up every weekend because there was so much to learn and I wanted to free up Robert and Mary’s time by helping them with whatever needed to be done.

The time it took to drive up to Pathways was still the same, but it seemed to go faster. And now, as I review how things are working, I can see that my background in life until now has actually prepared me to help Pathways in a manner that can contribute to its future expansion potential.

I asked Holy Spirit on numerous occasions to help me recognize if this is where I was supposed to be and if this is what I was supposed to be doing. I got my answers in more ways than one. I feel very, very grateful to have this opportunity to give to Pathways of Light. I have tremendous gratitude for this organization, as well as the people in it. It is such a wonderful environment to be in where everyone is walking the same talk, which is that Holy Spirit will provide us the answer. We need just ask.

Q — How is the Holy Spirit guiding you and helping you with healing your mind and your ministry?

Nancy — I recognize that my mind is healing daily. I don’t react to events the same way. I can see the joy increasing every day. My ministry is not exactly expanding the way I had planned, which was to facilitate many courses and do other types of classes. But I realize that the contribution I’m making right now is probably the best for all involved, and I’m learning so much in return. I’m learning how to bring these courses into my daily business life. My job provides me the money to do additional volunteer work. Doing God’s ministry does not look the same for everyone.

Q — How much time each day do you give to God in quiet listening?

Nancy — I do this every morning and every night, at a minimum. I typically also do this for maybe another 15 minutes at night, and when I’m at home on the weekends, I spend half an hour in quiet time. Throughout my work day, I also practice (not consistently) giving a few seconds to God.

Q — What form is your ministry taking right now in your life as you continue to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit with all your daily decisions?

Nancy — It’s not as I expected. Surprise, surprise! ACIM states that a teacher is an example. And so I practice at my corporate job bringing God into all situations. It seems that right now this is where God wants me. God is everywhere and everyone can use God’s Love. I also volunteer at Pathways, since I have the need to give back to where I have received, and still receive, help with my ministry. I’m learning that my ministry is God in my daily life, no matter what God is having me do that day.

Q — What have you learned from Holy Spirit about how you can be more helpful to your brothers and sisters on your mutual journey of awakening?

Nancy — I have learned to be more patient. I have learned to allow others and myself the time to complete our own work in our own time. The help we provide each other on our own path is to Love each other. There is nothing greater than this, for in this we show each other that we are nothing but Love.

Rev. Nancy Schilli is a Pathways of Light minister living in Gurnee, Illinois.

© 2004, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice and website address are included.

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Putting Things in a Different Light

by Rev. Myron Jones, O.M.C.

I have been working on course 905: Special Relationships vs Holy Relationships. It is a wonderful course and I’ve experienced several shifts in perception. One of the sections points out how we project our own sense of guilt onto others. It asks that I think of ways the errors in my brother seem to be hard to understand. I am asked to make note of these errors. Immediately I thought of my ex-husband. We have been divorced for very nearly four years now and I can still list his errors in pretty impressive detail, so I used him to do this exercise.

At first, I just listed things about him that irritated me. Then I added some things he did that were painful to think about. As I listed the different ways in which we wounded each other, more and more memories came to me. In my mind I relived some of the incidents that led to our divorce. As I did so, I began to re-experience the emotions that accompanied the accusations we hurled at each other. I found myself feeling angry because of things he said and did. I felt fearful as I thought that being in that situation once seemed to make it possible to be in it again.

I felt so guilty because staying in that situation seemed to be damaging to my children. I felt ashamed because I allowed this to happen to me and continued to allow it for such a long time. By the time I finished this list, I was feeling pretty drained and my most immediate thought was, “I hope I’m not going to be asked to see this differently, because I don’t see how I can.” And of course, I was asked to do just that.

This seemed like such a huge task, and truly I didn’t want to do it. I just wanted to relegate those memories to the dark place in my mind where I had been keeping them before I pulled them out for this process. But, the only way to get to the next step in this course is to get through this one, so I got started. Using the guided meditation “From Specialness to Holiness” that came with course 905, I asked the Holy Spirit to look at these thoughts with me. I asked him for a different way to see what happened in our marriage. I also asked for a different way to see my guilty condemnation of both my ex-husband and myself. I asked for healing of my reluctance to forgive.

The first thought that came to me was that so much of his behavior resulted from the way he was raised; the things he learned from his parents. I understand this because I have had to unlearn a few things I picked up as a child. We all know that not everything we learn as we are growing up is going to be helpful to us as adults. He has indicated to me in the past that he was raised in a very authoritarian atmosphere where they were taught that there is only one way to do things. They were not encouraged to question what they were told or to look for their own answers. It must have been very frustrating to him that neither his wife nor his kids accepted his authority without question. He was taught that, as the father, being the authority for his family was his job. It must have felt like he was failing in his job as the father. Being a parent is hard and we aren’t born with the necessary skills nor are we taught them. As I thought about this, I felt my resentment and anger loosening. There is another way to see things!

More than once I had tried to share with him a different way of experiencing our relationship and of raising our children. He was always resistant to anything that didn’t mirror what he already believed. Even though he was willing to admit that some of the things he was doing weren’t working, he was unable to consider changing. It always seemed to him to be the fault of the other person that his method wasn’t working. I couldn’t understand this at the time and I felt so frustrated and angry about it. Now Holy Spirit showed me something that helped me to understand.

I saw him in his dream. He was in a completely dark room. He stumbled around for awhile searching for a way out. He called for help and his ego answered him with misdirection and warned him of the danger of listening to any other voice. At first he tried to find a way out of this darkened room, but finally he became used to it. He became afraid that however bad this is, something else could be even worse. He was so afraid of losing what little he had that he became paralyzed into inaction. He sensed a door leading out, but he stopped looking for it now that he was more afraid of leaving than of staying.

Wow, that certainly puts things in a different light! Why did I have so much resistance to this process? Why did I feel the need to cling to my resentments and blame? When I asked these questions, I began to realize that it is easier to look at his errors than my own. Now I was seeing myself in that dark room with him. For years we were caught up in the defend/attack cycle, just wounding each other endlessly. It seemed to have no end and no way out. We were both listening to the wrong voice. I believed the ego when it told me that if I set my weapons aside I would be unprotected; that if I quit fighting back I would be annihilated.

I kept my attention on his errors so that I didn’t have to see my own. I didn’t think I dared look at my own because the ego assured me that they were so horrific I would certainly be condemned. Of course, what the ego didn’t tell me was that to stay focused on his errors would keep me locked in mortal combat with him even though I have physically taken myself from the arena. I thought I had made progress when I chose to step out of that darkened room we had shared for so long, but until I choose to forgive, I am still in darkness.

Though I had been afraid to look at my errors, I now saw that I would have to. The Holy Spirit assured me that I had nothing to be ashamed of. I was, for a time, following a voice in the hopes of escape. I had been listening to the wrong voice and was being misled. That is all. It did not make me evil — just mistaken. There is another Voice and I am learning to listen to It. The same is true of my ex-husband. He is not evil. He is not condemned. He is just mistaken . He has access to the other Voice as well. When he is ready he will hear it, too.

The voice for the ego tried to convince me that our conflict was important and that what we did to each other as we flailed around in that blinded state would condemn us to hell. The voice for the Holy Spirit assures me that this is not so. It was actually just one more learning experience. We protracted it as long as was necessary to learn the lessons. The ego tried to convince me that I was trapped there, unable to get out. I see now that I was never trapped. I didn’t escape, I simply learned from the situation what I could. Then I stepped out of it as easily as walking through an open door.

Before I looked at this with the Holy Spirit I saw shame and fear. I saw hate and blame, recriminations and self recriminations. I hated myself for what I did and felt, and I projected those feelings onto my ex-husband so I hated him as well. With the Holy Spirit’s help I am able to look at the same situation and see past all of those dark thoughts as if they were a fog being burned off by the light of forgiveness. I had been looking on our marriage as a huge mistake, as just one senseless battle after another. I had been feeling like a failure. Now I just see our life together as two Sons of God helping each other return home.

Rev. Myron Jones is a Pathways of Light minister living in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

© 2004, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice and website address are included.

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When We Give, We Truly Receive

by Rev. Bob Thompson, O.M.C.

On October 11th, 2003, a neighbor asked me if I would tutor his eighth grade son, whom the father was afraid might become a high school dropout. The school had been thinking about keeping him in seventh grade for an additional year.

This resonated very strongly with me, because my end of the school year seventh grade report card had the notation, “promoted to eighth grade as long as average is above C level.” So in eighth grade, I doodled a little less, learned to swim, and kept my nose above C level (barely). Having learned to survive the ocean of eighth grade education myself, I thought that I might be able to help him keep his nose above C level, too.

I agreed to participate in the tutoring relationship and the father then talked to his son, who initially was less than enthusiastic about the first two hour session. You may consider “less than enthusiastic” an understatement. I also shared my intent to tutor with a friend, and I added, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” To which my friend smilingly replied, “Yes, Bob. You’re going to learn a lot.”

During the first session, I asked the 13 year old how he felt about spending an extra two hours working with me, especially after he had just spent a whole day in school. With no hesitation he said, “To be old and wise, you must first be young and stupid.” I laughed loudly and for a lon-n-n-g-g time until I had tears in my eyes. (I also began to wonder which one of us was the tutor.)

We began talking about what he would really like to do in life. He told me that he had travelled to the State of Washington last summer with a former baby sitter and her husband (also good friends and neighbors of mine) for the naval retirement of one of their sons after 20 years of service. The thirteen year old was deeply committed to becoming a Navy Seal.

Noting that he had difficulty with two, three, and four letter words, I decided to do a basic assessment. I downloaded a free vocabulary list from http://www.tampareads.com (thanks to research done by a local librarian). We started with a First Grade National Vocabulary List of 340 most frequently used words by a first grader. He was able to pronounce, and use in a sentence, 310 of them correctly (90%). He was able to spell 207 correctly (67%).

After sharing these results with him, I asked if he thought he could pass the basic entrance naval exam? He said, “No.” We decided to begin working with the First Grade National Vocabulary Work lists. I asked him about his work experience and he told me that he could do a lot of things. His basic summer job was milking cows for a local farmer, for which he woke himself up at 5:30 every morning without an alarm clock. He also was paid for construction work, cement work, roofing, and washing dishes and cleaning tables at a local country restaurant.

One Friday, I called the restaurant (knowing the owners) made reservations for four, asking if my student, the dishwasher, could be our waiter, so he could meet my friends. The arrangements were made. He did a good job going back and forth between washing dishes, cleaning off tables and serving us — doing three jobs at once.

The following Monday he told me that when they got rushed that Friday and Saturday, they would let him wait on a few other tables. He told me that in addition to his regular hourly pay, he also earned $120.00 in tips. When I mention this to friends, they seriously consider working part time, and ask, “Where is this restaurant?”

The parents invited me to a parent-teachers conference during which I mentioned his “To be old and wise, you must first be, young and stupid” statement. His learning disabilities teacher thought that was great, and wrote down the quote.

After going over his weekly schedule of activities, he felt that he could only study three times a week for two hours. We have been doing that for two months now. He rarely will take a break for a soda, even when repeatedly invited to do so. I shared with him my certainty that he was above average in intelligence and asked him why he was currently in a learning disabilities Class. He smiled and answered, “I goof around some.” (I also suspect that he is a doodler.)

We are now into the 2nd Grade National Vocabulary Lists (over 800 words). His mom and dad are both being trained and have agreed to help him with Grades 3,4, and 5, a total of another 2,500 words. The parents, though divorced for years now, meet weekly with me when they bring him and pick him up. The parents also communicate with me weekly by e-mail, as do a variety of teachers from the school. We are slowly luring other teachers into this highly creative “loop.”

His improvement since mid-October, has been astounding. Especially in his reading, and spelling abilities. He is an encyclopedia of information about everything going on within ten miles of here. ( I am really learning a lot!) Last year at 12, he shot a buck deer for himself and then shot another for his father.

He asks me questions about myself also. For example, he heard that they called me Tiger Thompson when I used to be a boxer. So next time he came over I had a collection of newspaper articles for him to read and a rather dramatic series of 8” by 10” photos documenting my effectiveness as a gladiator. I suspect that I have been or am becoming, a legend in his own mind. That is only fair, for that is what he has become to me because of his heroic efforts. He is the perfect mirror for enabling me to see myself as a child and remember so much from my past that contributed to my being who I am now.

For me, it is an outstanding example that when we give, we truly receive and that when we help another, we are truly helping ourselves. My goal is to work myself out of this highly creative, growth experience as quickly as possible ( I already know, that we are friends and bonded for life). He frequently moves me to hilarious laughter and to tears, like at this moment.

Rev. Bob Thompson is a Pathways of Light minister living in Portage, Wisconsin.

© 2004, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
You may freely share copies of this with your friends, provided this notice and website address are included.

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