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Outside the Box

Outside the Box

I’ve been working on 908 Abundance Awareness. I have gained so much from doing this Pathways course. Of course, I always say that about all of the courses, but there is an idea in this one that is particularly helpful to me. The course talks about the ego process of solving problems on its own by bringing the past to the present, and how this guarantees the problems will keep coming. The course talks about how solving problems within the box (the ego belief in separation) doesn’t free it from the box, which is the problem; and then talks about how we need to go outside the box (to the Holy Spirit).

That whole concept has really caught my imagination. I am a very visual person and perhaps that is why this works so well for me. I decided to start using this process with some of those stubborn problems that won’t seem to go away. Weight loss is a good example. I can’t tell you how many times I thought I’d solved that puzzle, just to see it pop up again.

I decided that every time I felt guilty for eating something, or worried about what the scale reads, or concerned about how something fits, I would step out of that box. The way I do it is to first become aware of when I am thinking about weight. I’ve done it for so long that I have become unaware of my thoughts. It is sometimes like background noise; I hardly even notice the worrisome concerns.

Every time I am aware of these weight concerns, I see myself sitting in a box, which is a problem to solve, and I am surrounded by puzzle pieces. It is a familiar puzzle. I have put the pieces together many times. I’ve sometimes thought I had finally hit on a design that I really liked, one that would work for me; but, ultimately, I would find myself back in the box, pieces scattered around me. I started to examine the pieces and found some that fit together to create a low fat diet that I was once convinced was my savior. Then I found the pieces that created a picture of me exercising; weight dripping off me with the beads of perspiration. That one was especially ill conceived and very short lived.

I found all sorts of diet variations in the pieces; all stuff I picked up from women’s magazines and health publications and crazy stuff from other desperate folks. Oh yeah, there’s the popcorn diet. I remember that one. I found out one cannot survive on popcorn alone. Oh my, all those pieces; all those parts of my past. No matter how I put the puzzle together; no matter how I rearranged the pieces, nothing ever changed. I’m still imprisoned in this weight box.

As I dig deeply through all of the available pieces, I find some of my mom. As I put them together, I see a picture of her expressing her own fears of weight gain; the same fears that she learned from her mother. Weight gain seems to run in our family and with that, the fear has been passed down from one generation to another. The sins (errors in thinking) of the mother will be visited on the children?  I see that this is probably the basis for the thinking errors that helped form my box, and as long as I keep going back to the past for my answers, I am going to keep running into this wall.

The problem is obvious. Nothing from the past is going to help me change the future. It is just going to keep me in the problem, and all that I have to work with in this box are pieces from the past. So, since nothing from the past has worked, and there doesn’t seem to be anything in the box to help me, I decided to seek help outside the box. I asked the Holy Spirit to look at this with me. I asked Him to show me another way to see this. I asked Him to correct my thinking and heal my mind. I expressed my willingness to give up all my past beliefs and all my preconceived notions about how it ought to work. I confessed to the Holy Spirit that I don’t have the answer in my box.

I have had to go through this process a bunch of times. I have found it surprisingly difficult to give up the idea that I can do it myself, in spite of all the evidence that I can?t. Playing with those puzzle pieces has become such an ingrained habit that I find it difficult to give it up. I keep climbing back into my familiar box. Now that I’ve looked at the possibility of being out of it, I find it cramped and uncomfortable, so I don’t mind going through the process again. Often, once I start experiencing some success, I automatically try to take over and I wind up back in the box. Just tonight as I was leaving the restaurant, I started shifting through the puzzle pieces to see where the meal I had just finished fit into the puzzle. Then I remembered my willingness to give this to the Holy Spirit, and thanked Him for the reminder. I am grateful that I almost always remember to turn it over to Him. I?m pretty excited about this, because, I realize that while the size and shape of my body matters only in the illusion, which, by definition, doesn?t even exist; using this problem to practice following the Holy Spirit?s guidance is essential. In the Manual, page 70, it says, ?Do not, then, think that following the Holy Spirit?s guidance is necessary merely because of your own inadequacies. It is the way out of hell for you.

I notice that when I see myself in that particular box, it no longer seems as real to me; as if the sides of the box shimmer uncertainly in the light. The Holy Spirit whispers to my heart that soon I will see they are gone altogether, and I will know they never really existed except in my own mind.

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