The Miracle Method

Excerpt from the book Illness to WEllness: 

Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle.

-A Course in Miracles

The Miracle Method (MM) is an attempt to eliminate contradictions and mismatches between who we are and who we wish to be. It is based on The Alignment Continuum, where we align our soul’s awareness, our mind’s attention (both conscious and unconscious), our heart’s intention, and our body’s inspired actions and behaviors.

The goal of The Miracle Method is not perfection. We are striving, quite simply, to be better than the moment prior.

Miracles require no steps, no methods. They occur spontaneously anytime we reconnect with our higher Self. The steps to follow are attempts to formulate that which can’t be formulated. With that said, the MM is an experiential process that ensures, more times than not, you will succeed in the forever practice of creating miracles.

The MM is based, in part, on the triune model of the brain discussed earlier. Each practice helps to break the chains of pathological automations, reactions, misidentifications (with our ego), and emotional-mental fusion. The four-step process is a whole-brain practice of integrating our reptilian, mammalian, neocortex, and angel lobes. The specific techniques within each practice are not important. What is important, however, is finding the tools that resonate with you.

The MM can be likened to the spiritual practice found in Alcoholics Anonymous, “Let go and let God.” It is one of the most important practices for living a life of peace. Miracles help us to recognize the divinity in and around us and the abundance of each and every moment. We must remember that it takes no effort to be who you really are and takes extreme effort (learned associations and programming) to be who you are not. This includes limiting beliefs such as the attachment we have to our body—designed for sickness and suffering.

We will use the acronym PATH to help guide us on CMM’s four-step process. They include contacting the present moment, awareness, tracing and translating, and finally, contacting and connecting with your highest Self. This practice is amalgam of the ideas and theories laid out in this book:

1. Present Moment: Contact and connect to the present moment to help pause non-nurturing reactivity and less than heroic responses that arise from our reptilian and mammalian brain centers. It is here where we put a space in between stimulus and response or our endless array of non-nurturing reactions.
2. Awareness: Contact and connect to the “witness.” It is here we can take a 10,000-foot view as we begin to observe our lives without judgment. The gift of awareness allows us to see things as they are rather than as we think they are. In its most simple iteration, we name what we see and separate facts from opinions. In addition, this step helps to counter the pathological emotional-mental fusion arising from our mammalian cortex and neocortex, respectively. Recall that pathological fusion creates the misidentification of Self as an emotion, feeling, sensation, thought, belief, mask, shell, or shadow. As a counterpoint, awareness allows us to sit in the seat of pure witness consciousness as we put space between these misidentifications. This space between stimulus and response is connected to the infinite field and where our potential resides. Reaction collapsed the potential into a conditioned past habit. Response, on the other hand, allows us to collapse our potentials into an enlightened manifestation that rises above our past conditioning.
3. Tracing and Translating: This is a powerful mental and intellectual step that helps us tap into the brain’s higher centers (neocortex and angel lobes) as well as the pure primordial powers of being and doing. Tracing, as the name suggests, asks us to trace our thousands of problems back to pure unity consciousness (I to We), the primordial elements (e.g., our needs), the tiny mad idea, or the simplicity of one problem, one solution. The second part of the process, translating, involves a movement from being (recognizing and surrendering to the one problem, one solution) to the energies of doing as we translate the primordial elements (tracings) into actionable values of living. From a practical perspective, this step is an exploration of your values, needs, and who and what is most important to you. It allows us to wake up from the nightmare rather than trying to fix the nightmare of our thousands of problems. Simply ask, what need is unmet or frustrated? What values do they represent?
4. Highest Self: In reality, this is the only step needed. It is a full integration of physical and nonphysical brain centers. Here we move away from an intellectual and emotional understanding to a full embodiment as we contact and connect with our highest Self. As we do so, we respond heroically, shift from knowledge to wisdom, use nourishing discernment, and sit in a state of doing and being that transcends polarities and contradictions. The true Self is our home underneath the masks, shells, and armor we present to the world. Life is seen, quite simply, as love or a call for love. This step is the ultimate choice point–the choice to react from past egoic conditioning or to respond from our highest Self. From a practical perspective, this step asks us to embody and uncover our values (e.g., the qualities of the true Self). As we do, we begin to live “from or with” our values rather than states of emptiness, lack, and scarcity. Recall, it is far more effective to the manifestation process if we live in a state of fulfilment first before taking the necessary action or inaction.

Step 1: Contacting and Connecting with the Present Moment

The first step or goal is to contact the ever-present now moment and, if needed, release unwanted or undigested energies or emotions. This allows respite away from the reptilian and mammalian brain’s automations, allowing us the opportunity to respond as our highest Self. There are a host of techniques that can be used. Here are a few ideas: 

• When feeling stressed or experiencing unwanted feelings or emotions (fear and anxiety), pause, stop, and notice. Give yourself an adult time-out. If needed, use a mantra to remind yourself that “In the present moment, right here and now, I am safe.”
• Coherence exercises (see Chapter 22): Practice present moment awareness, mindfulness, breathwork, grounding or Earthing, and heart-respiratory coherence.
• Releasing: A new field of treatment, broadly defined as somatic therapy, takes a novel approach to diffusion and the release of emotions, mental constructs, and traumas. Unlike standard mental health therapies (i.e., talk therapy), somatic therapy practices incorporate body-oriented modalities such as shaking, dancing, moving, and exercise to diffuse unwanted, stored bodily tension, trauma, and stress. One of its pioneers, Dr. Peter A. Levine, discovered thirty-five years ago that wild animals react, first, through the classic fight-flight mechanisms that, for example, increase stress chemicals and blood flow. The recovery process, however, involves the release of these same fight-flight mechanisms. For example, before the freezing response kicks in, wild animals complete the stress recovery cycle by tremoring muscular spasms and flailing of limbs. The shaking and tremoring help discharge stress chemicals, emotions, and unwanted traumatic energies that would otherwise get frozen in the body. All too often and partly due to culturally accepted modes of conduct, we humans feel we don’t have the opportunity to diffuse, shake, dance, or release these unwanted energies. Levine created Somatic Experiencing bodywork to help patients experience and complete the discharge that was initially aborted decades prior.

Step 2: Awareness

Although awareness has many meanings, we will highlight, for the purpose of this discussion, its most salient characteristic as human consciousness embodied by the witness or seer.

Building on the practice of pausing, stopping, and noticing, we now take the first steps to diffuse from our emotions and mental constructs. Remember, the witness is you, a subject. Everything else is not you, an object. Anything you can name (see, hear, feel), quantify, qualify, or become aware of is an object and, therefore, not the witness. This includes our thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, personality traits, accolades, degrees, roles, and more. All these objects are witnessed by you as the subject and seer. They are things you sense or experience and in no way can be equated with who you truly are.

If we can hold on for ninety seconds without re-fusing or re-ruminating, we might be able to break free of our incessant emotional and mental loops. Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor, author of My Stroke of Insight, calls this the ninety-second rule: “When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a ninety-second chemical process that happens; any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.” Two of the best practices to consider are:

• Neti-Neti Traditional and Parts (see Chapter 26)
• Name to tame to transcend: the art of taking an experience, naming it, and separating the facts from any opinions or judgements

Step 3: Tracing and Translating

Tracing

Tracing involves an intellectual exploration of our thousands of problems. In this step, we are asked to trace our problems or complex secondary elements back to their roots. Take time to look back over the primal elements and the concept of the primal struggle. Tracing involves identifying the cause behind our sea of endless problems. The goal is to identify the cause behind the problem as you explore:

• The human need involved
• The emotional landscape and its inherent meaning
• Your primal reactive pattern
• One problem-one solution doctrine

Example: Someone says something to us. We react with anger and hostility. As the hours pass, we begin to feel an increased intensity in our emotional landscape. In turn, we go home and attempt to numb the pain, guilt, and shame with alcohol, binge eating, and Netflix.

All these complex behaviors, thoughts, emotions, and reactions are secondary elements that we, collectively and erroneously, equate as our “problems.” The truth lies hidden under these surface distractions. Our goal, therefore, is to trace the so-called problems back to the source of origin, our primordial elements.

Consider the example above; we reacted with anger, spiraled down into complex psychological musings (shame and guilt), and engaged in destructive behaviors simply because we may have felt unsafe. Our nervous system interpreted our friend’s words as “danger,” and then the primitive fight or flight programs mixed with past mental interpretations, stories, and beliefs. And because we did not take time to consciously reflect on our subconscious reactions, we continued to spiral downward, taking us miles and miles away from our true desire—the need for connection. The real problem in this scenario is how our needs for safety and connection were not met, not communicated, or frustrated.

Translating

With translating, we take the primordial elements and the one-problem-one solution doctrine and translate them into personal values and actionable daily habits. This step is an exploration of our vision, goals, strategies, and values. With the need uncovered, we can ask, “How do I satiate this need in a nourishing, loving, and empowering way?”

Step 4: Highest Self

This step in The Core Miracle Method is a practice of alchemizing, transmuting, and transcending all our fears (the metaphorical representation of pathological, maladaptive, toxic, and non-nurturing defense mechanisms, strategies, shadows, mental constructs, emotions, and behaviors) into ones that are more constructive, adaptive, nurturing, and healing (love).

It is a process of peeling away the onion layers or removing the proximal causes or effects to uncover and unearth root causes. Ultimately this process will lead us back to the decision-maker in the mind (cause), allowing us an opportunity to choose right versus wrong-mindedness, again and again, thought by thought, breath by breath, as we cultivate states of peace, equanimity, and love. Our goal is to make our ego a servant (wrong-mindedness) to our higher Self (right-mindedness). When this is accomplished, there is an instantaneous alignment in the present moment between our needs, values, awareness, attention, intention, and behaviors. 

A Course in Miracles calls this moment the holy instant. In other words, we don’t have to wait for every thought, emotion, feeling, and sensation to be aligned. Willingness to move towards the holy instant allows the holy instant to complete the process. As an analogy, we don’t clean ourselves before entering the shower–that’s the shower’s job. The Course explains this poetically:

The desire and willingness to let it come precedes its coming…Come to it not in arrogance, assuming that you must achieve the state it’s coming brings with it. The miracle of the holy instant lies in your willingness to let it be what it is…In preparing for the holy instant, do not attempt to make yourself holy to be ready to receive it. That is but to confuse your role with God’s…You make it difficult, because you insist there must be more that you need do. You find it difficult to accept the idea that you need give so little, to receive so much…Never approach the holy instant after you have tried to remove all fear and hatred from your mind. That is its function…The necessary condition for the holy instant does not require that you have no thoughts that are not pure. But it does require that you have none that you would not keep.

In this final step, every situation is seen as love or a call for love. As we embody miracle-mindedness, we surrender our self-identity and sit, without dichotomy, in a state of being and doing.

Recall that a miracle is a shift in awareness, perception, emotion, or behavior that moves us from fear (circumstances, anxieties) to love. The miracle occurs every time we create alignment with our highest Self (comfort to courage, choosing a better narrative, self-betrayal to a values-driven life, taking a deep breath, and more).

Comparing our highest Self and ego:

• Ego: There are millions of problems, there is a hierarchy to our problems, and miracles are unavailable.
• Highest Self: There is only one problem (fear), and it blocks the awareness of love’s presence, there is no hierarchy of problems, and miracles are available at all times, waiting only on welcome.

There are many ways to contact our highest Self. Choose whatever options works best for you. Although some of the examples below may appear simple, think about their potential. Imagine how a person’s state of being or life can change in just a single aha moment or decision. (See Chapter 22 for coherence exercises and Chapter 26 for self-realization practices.)  

Empowering questions

• How can I move from fear to love?
• Is this true? Is it helpful? Kind? What would love do?
• What would be a more efficient, peaceful, or loving response?
• Do I choose conflict, to understand, or to be right over peace?
• How would my best Self respond?
• Can I see and hold other perspectives?
• What would you have me do, where would you have me go, and what would you have me say and to whom?
• What do I need to remove from my life? What do I need to say no to? What do I need to stop doing? What do I need to do less of?
• What do I need to say yes to? What do I need to continue doing more of?
• Can I do or not do whatever is called of me, peacefully?
• What nourishment am I missing from my life?
• For those things that I cannot control or remove, how can I transcend them? Surrender to them?
• Where do I need to create healthy boundaries? With myself? Others?
• How can I live a life by design?
• How can I avoid living in self-betrayal?
• How can I create more peace and equanimity in my life?
• How can I create more coherence (i.e., balance and harmony)?
• Do I know my values and needs? Am I living in alignment with them?

Affirmations or mantras

• At any moment, I can choose peace instead of this.
• At any moment, I can choose again.
• I choose to see my circumstances, problems, and obstacles as love or a call for love.
• I choose to respond rather than react from my core values and needs.
• I choose and desire miracles more than I desire pain and suffering.
• I am the unbounded witness behind my thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, free from the ego’s stories, judgments, and expectations.