Giving Up Regret

"The little problems that you keep and hide become your secret sins, because you did not choose to let them be removed for you. And so they gather dust and grow, until they cover everything that you perceive and leave you fair to no one. Not one right do you believe you have. And bitterness, with vengeance justified and mercy lost, condemns you as unworthy of forgiveness. The unforgiven have no mercy to bestow upon another. That is why your sole responsibility must be to take forgiveness for yourself." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 25, Section IX, 9:1-6

Regret may seem a strange topic to write about during this festive and joyous season. But in conversations with friends and clients, and in examining my own mind and heart, I see that regret is the chief tool of the imagined, separate self to maintain guilt and separation. By maintaining our screw-ups and our unworthiness, we get to stay 'safely' separate. What a crock.

Forgiveness is our only function here. We're not here to make the dream look like we want it to look. We're here to reflect the Love and Beauty that we are, as emanations of the One Mind of God. We have no separate function. Because we think we do, forgiveness 'repairs' that false perception. And the miracle of healed perception then reflects a forgiven world, which doesn't look anything like the old world of guilt and endless regret. We're free to follow the Voice of God without resistance, to shine wherever we're led, knowing it's all One in the Allness of God.

You may find that you resist the thought that you have anything to do with your ongoing guilt and regret. You may have been taught that they're the natural result of sinning against God. Let me ask you something. If God is All, meaning All Power, All Knowledge, All Substance, All Loving, the Only Mind and All That IS... then where exactly did this something wrong take place, and who exactly was it who did it? Only in our dreams can unreality seem substantial and real. Only in our inflated ego dreams could we have a power that opposed God, an ability to mess up what God created Whole.

Just as the past never was, just as guilt is just a story of separation from God that never was, regret is purposeless. It's only imagined function is to maintain an illusory separation from your True Self, your Oneness with God. Giving it up, releasing it to the Holy Spirit to be forgiven and released is actually the easiest and most natural thing you've ever done. You just have to do it.

Remember... God's Will for us is perfect happiness. It's a done deal. But while we're still dreaming, allowing the Holy Spirit to correct the errors in our mind through forgiveness is the way to remember the Truth. Self-forgiveness makes giving up regret easy, because we finally see that it never happened at all. We have always been innocent and free. And by our own release, we have forgiven and released the world.

"To give a problem to the Holy Spirit to solve for you means that you want it solved. To keep it for yourself to solve without His help is to decide it should remain unsettled, unresolved, and lasting in its power of injustice and attack." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 25, Section IX, 7:5-6