Miracles News

July-September, 2016

Is There Freedom from Pain While in the Dream?

by Rev. Rosemarie Tropf, O.M.C.

Rev. Rosemarie Tropf As a student of ACIM for many years I have struggled with the question of whether I can reduce pain in the body through the study and practice of Spiritual lessons. I have studied Rosicrucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many new age philosophies ever since I could read. I hobbled my way through two masters degrees in religious studies to try to figure out what all that meant. I am a seeker. I have also been a seeker suffering with chronic physical pain all along this path. I have often asked myself if I should stop studying spiritual issues because maybe that’s what’s making me hurt.

I have run the gamut of what could be causing me to be the person who suffers from this amount of pain when I am the most spiritual minded person I know. I have always taught spiritual lessons to everyone I know. I don’t know how to talk about other things very often. I am not interested in other things. They feel shallow or frivolous to me. I go to movies and I love talking about movies but I only talk about the spiritual lessons we can learn in each scene. I love music but I talk about the spiritual vibration of different kinds music and how it raises or lowers our vibration. I love my kids and I always teach them the spiritual lessons I have learned to help them make their decisions in life. So why me? Why me God?

I ask, “Holy Spirit, can You help me with this?” From Chapter 8 in ACIM where I felt led to read today, “When the ego tempts you to sickness do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body, for this would merely be to accept the ego’s belief that the body is the proper aim of healing.” (T-8.IX.1:5)

As I suffer from spinal pain I feel like screaming, “But I want to heal the body. How can this be my mind if I can see it on the MRI and I can see it on the X-Ray? Surely magic like herbs, vitamins or surgery is just as powerful as ACIM and Holy Spirit’s Love.”

The following sentence in Chapter 8 enlightens me a bit more when it says, “Ask, rather, that the Holy Spirit teach you the right perception of the body, for perception alone can be distorted. Only perception can be sick, because only perception can be distorted.” (T-8.IX.1:6)

Aha! Once again I have another message that the answer is not in healing the body but in healing the mind. But as I sit in this chair with a neck brace on… again… taking a steroidal medication so I can calm the pain down so I can function in the world, I say, “Holy Spirit I am healing my mind and I want to teach what I am learning, but how can I when I have this pain that ties me down to a chair like this?”

There are other questions, there are other quotes in the Course but basically this is the pattern that goes around and around in my mind on a daily or even hourly basis.

I truly “think” that I believe I am not the body. I truly think I know that I am a spiritual being. Maybe I don’t believe that? Now I go round and round questioning myself on how maybe I’m fooling myself and then I know ego mind has gotten in there again because that makes me feel very bad emotionally.

Somebody once told me that my body is my classroom. I believe that because there is no more motivating factor for me than this pain in this life that drives me to find God.

I don’t worry about money, or clothes, or appearances or status. All I have ever deeply want, that I actually long for, is a connection to God. Of course, I don’t want to live in squalor or filth, I don’t want to live in an unsafe place and I do want to be surrounded by those who love me, but I don’t think about any of that like I think about pain. I always think no matter what house I live in, or what I am wearing, I can always teach the Course or meditate so I would be happy. Except that the physical pain immobilizes me so that I am limited in how much I teach and that would make me very upset to not be able to teach.

Teaching is my joy. Teaching others to awaken is my purpose. I want to awaken as well. So then another line in Chapter 8 says this: “All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. They are attempts to reinforce sleeping out of fear of waking.” (T-8.IX.3:2-3)

As I read the above I think, “Aha, now we are onto something here.” I spend all my waking hours, most of my life, thinking about awakening, thinking about God’s Love, thinking about enlightenment or whatever the term is at the time but, still, I must be afraid of it. I have had some instances where I felt transcended to this life and I did feel fear of losing loved ones who might think I was too kooky now to hang out with. I mean I am kooky enough to some as it is.

I have often denied God so I can sound social enough to fit in. I have often been afraid of having no pain because I was afraid others would think I had been faking it all along. Now there’s an ego pride issue that is ferocious in this instance. How much of a trap is that?

Later in Chapter 8 in ACIM it says this: “Healing is release from the fear of waking and the substitution of the decision to wake. The decision to wake is the reflection of the will to love, since all healing involves replacing fear with love.” (T-8.IX.5:1-2)

Replacing fear with love! Release the fear of waking! The decision to wake is a reflection of the will to love. Love is God’s Will. I know from studying the Course. I am deciding right this minute to release my fear of waking with the help of Holy Spirit. I am deciding right this minute to stop denying God to keep friends who do not believe in the spiritual part of life, (without attacking) but truth shall set them free as well.

God is my Source not me, not my friends or family but God because S/He is the Loving Presence in my life. My denial to anyone else does not matter in the dream but my denial matters if I deny it to myself and I have done that. I am making the decision now to acknowledge my Source as the Loving Presence of God. I am the flower. God is my root. I am the wave. God is the ocean. This is not theory this is truth. Today I am deciding to not analyze the darkness but to see the Light, and most of all to the be the Light.

I Am grateful to Holy Spirit. I am grateful to Jesus for these teachings. I am grateful to Pathways for being guides for so many to follow this path.

Rev. Rosemarie Tropf is a Pathways of Light minister living in Safety Harbor, FL.
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