Ever feel like daily spiritual discipline is a whole lotta work with no immediate payoff here in the 3-D world?
All this effort to retrain my mind to see the world correctly, you think, yet I’m still reacting to the crap around me in the same old ways. That’s how it feels sometimes, at least for me.
I know all this forgiveness work is hugely powerful in terms of healing my ego mind – I can feel it happening more and more all the time – but somehow divine love never seems to be my first reaction to anything.
Well, until yesterday. That’s when I got the opportunity to see just how far I’ve really come.
My husband, like many guys, is a tech geek. I, like many women, am not. He’s been lobbying for high definition TV for about a year now. Me, I harbor no desire to see the pancake makeup actors wear to cover their pores. Especially when it’s going to cost me an extra $20 a month for the privilege.
Truth be told, I’m not so in love with TV at all, anymore. It just isn’t any fun, watching cataclysmic ego stories of good and evil. But Kurt likes it, and he really wanted that HDTV. So I relented.
And then it turned out it came with hidden fees that made the total more like $32 extra per month. Kurt took it as a personal crusade, spending hours on the phone with the DirecTV people. But they wouldn’t budge.
So he removed the DirecTV satellite dish and switched to Dish Network instead. Dish Network (compared to DirecTV) comes with a user interface straight out of the Stone Age. It’s clunky, nonsensical and needlessly complex, making even the simplest functions a difficult mess. So much so that it puts me off watching TV altogether. That’s how much I hate using that remote on that interface.
In earlier times, I would’ve been really bummed out about that. But what the hey, I’ve been looking for a reason to watch less TV. Now I’ve found it.
Yesterday as I juggled my own hectic workday, in the background I could hear Kurt on the phone with DirecTV for what seemed like hours. He emerged afterward looking flushed and upset; I thought he might burst into tears.
“It’s really terrible,” he said, flinching a little, and I realized he had something he was afraid to tell me; he was bracing himself for my reaction. “I had to sign a brand new 24 month contract when we ordered the HDTV,” he said, “and DirecTV refuses to let us out of that contract. We owe them almost $500 in cancellation fees.”
The old me, the me I’ve been all my life, would not have taken that news calmly. I’d have let him have it with both barrels for dragging me down this HDTV road in the first place, leaving me with a new TV watching experience I absolutely hate, and $500 poorer to boot. I’d have made a major drama out of it, remaining secretly resentful for months afterward every time the TV was switched on.
But it wasn’t the old me. I listened peacefully to his unhappy tale, observed the fear and frustration on his face, and immediately thought: It’s just money. You are the perfect light of heaven, and I have no desire to punish you. Because you’re not guilty of anything.
It wasn’t a forgiveness exercise – that was my honest-to-God first reaction. I then broadened the forgiveness to include all of Dish Network (who would charge the same cancellation fees if we bailed on them) and all of DirecTV. They’re taking our money, but they’re really just calling for love. It’s all perfect, exactly as it is.
Astonishingly, the whole mess has never interrupted my peace for even a moment. And I’d pay a hell of a lot more than $500 for that kind of joyous serenity, any day.
So I guess the moral of the story is: Keep doing those forgiveness exercises, kids. Keep retraining your mind to see the truth of Oneness in everything, because you never know when it’ll actually start sinking in.
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