 In the Course, what Jesus says, you are not responsible for the error. You are responsible for accepting the correction for the error. Because I think a lot of times when we start to take responsibility, we start to take ownership of guilt. We start to take ownership of blame and we reel it in. And then we feel like, I'm doing this to myself. And it's terrible. It feels awful. And we stop short of forgiveness. We stop short of that release. Like, this is not God's will for me. God wills for me to be innocent, to feel that innocence. And so, we can bring it back sometimes all the way back to the thoughts. But we still feel responsible for the thoughts. We still feel responsible for the erroneous thoughts. And we need Jesus to remind us, you are not responsible for the error. You are responsible for the correction of the error. That's what the Atonement is about. And I think with people pleasing, we get a lot of opportunities on a daily basis to kind of allow the Spirit to help us navigate our mind and the world that is projected from our mind. And the only way that we can really be free of people pleasing is we have to get down to the underlying beliefs and assumptions that are underneath our stream of thoughts that seem to be our everyday life. We have to get underneath that down to the level of belief. One time I was asking the Holy Spirit of Jesus, I said, because I like to do maps. I don't know if I was in seventh grade and I like to draw maps and color in countries and do all that. I'm very graphic. So I asked the Holy Spirit to give me graphic representation, the map of the mind so I could know what was going on and the outer level was the level of perception and then the emotions were right underneath it and the thoughts were under the emotions and then the beliefs were under the thoughts and then the core, the bullseye was desire. And I remember reading in the Course, truth will be returned to your awareness by your desire as it was lost to your awareness by your desire for something else. So desire is at the core of everything. That's like our point of prayer, our point of power. But those beliefs that we hold on to are right outside that ring of desire and until we get down to the underlying beliefs, it just seems as if the world is outside of us that our identity is shaky at best and that we need a lot of approval and being liked in order to feel good about ourselves when actually we have to learn to have integrity, really deep integrity before we can actually reach that point of peace. So for me, I had to start to see how far am I willing to go with this integrity, how far am I willing to go where I actually start to experience that there's nothing outside of me. I had to start questioning everything about the world. For example, when I would get disturbed about politicians and various political stances or whatever, I had Jesus inside saying, you're not really involved in politics. Politics are in you. When I got upset about society, I said, I'm just never going to be able to be peaceful as long as I'm living in this society, in this culture and I will never be peaceful. Jesus would say, you are not in the society. The society is in you. Or when I get upset with the country, I don't like certain things that my country is doing. It's not a very good representation of who I am. Jesus would say, you're not in the country. The country is in you. It was always pointing me back to everything that I perceived is based on belief. All the way to the point that he's saying that there is no world apart from what you think. That everything we think is out there in the world is actually in consciousness and we're still holding it in consciousness. We're still holding onto the beliefs and the concepts and then tricking ourselves to think that the world is doing it to us instead of us having the power. Us having, we can control the direction of our thinking. We don't have to succumb to ego thinking. We can actually align with God and think with God instead of trying to think against God. Another area for me was about competition. This is such a competitive society. Jesus is like, oh no, no, no. He said, never underestimate the need to be visual against the idea of competition. And so when you start to really take it to heart you start to take a look at where am I competitive? Where do I still value the competition? Where is it that I still believe the competition will bring me something that will give me peace of mind? Then you start to really have a healing that occurs because in one sense you're stepping back in your mind from these thoughts, from these beliefs and feeling an empowerment that comes from the miracle. When he calls out a course of miracles, he means it. He actually is calling us to be miracle workers and that took a while for me to take in because I thought, you got the wrong person. I had ambitions and goals for my life but miracle worker was not... I don't think that's on the SAT test or any of our aptitude tests in high school. The miracle worker, oh, hey, little David, it'll be a miracle worker. It's just not even in the discussion but at some point I began to really work with this and going, I guess I'm supposed to be the miracle worker. I mean, I think that's where this is all heading. And he also said, you know, seek not to change the world. Seek rather than to change your mind about the world. So it's not like we're going out to try to bestow miracles on people or convert people or save people or any of that stuff. It's all for our own mind training and our own mind healing and it's not about trying to change anybody at all or fix anybody at all. And that runs right in opposition to the people pleasing which is kind of like, oh, I'm going to act the way you want me to act and say the things that you want me to say because otherwise you may leave and there's still this deep sense of fear of abandonment and fear of loss. Why would we people please unless we were afraid of losing our jobs or afraid of losing our relationships or afraid of losing our parents and children? Why would we people please at all? We would just tell it like it is. We would say it, we would speak from our heart. And the more we work with the Course in Miracles and Authentic Spirituality we actually see that it is valuable for us to extend the truth inside of us that really nothing's going to come down on us. Sky isn't going to cave and fall in on us if we start really extending and sharing this love that wants to pour through us. It's quite the opposite. I went from being very shy as a child and always through the teenage years and high school and into college and university and being afraid of public speaking, afraid that I didn't belong to any kind of clubs or organizations or groups. I was too shy to belong to anything and then when I got into a Course in Miracles it was like all this love and joy just wanted to just come pouring through me at my course group. I had to start out from your course group and I was going to like five course groups a week and I was like, this is really good stuff but the ego was really terrified like, oh, oh, this is not good. We're shy. You should be doing all this joining and hugging and talking about your emotions and all that stuff but I could feel like that was the beginning of the end for the ego and then the more I just let it grow stronger and stronger in my awareness the more I realized that I didn't have anything to lose by being authentic and really sharing what was on my heart but actually people appreciated that and felt more and more like we had these deep heart to heart connections. So I started out like most of us with a circle of friends practicing with them and then I started to just say, I'm going to be willing and open to go wherever I'm invited.