After having struggled with anxiety for many years, I’m a big fan of inner peace. A HUGE fan.  I’ve found that simplicity breeds peace, so naturally, I like to keep things simple.

I have only one New Year’s resolution, which is actually not about New Year’s at all. It is about the way that I choose to live my life, every day of every year. Taking this one step has brought more peace to my mind and to my heart than I ever could have imagined before.

My resolution is simply this:

“I resolve to withhold nothing from my Inner Guide.”

My life, my relationships, my work, my money, my health, my body, my perceptions. It all goes. Every fleeting fear thought, every “tiny scrap of meanness,” every time I’m aware enough to catch a judgmental thought, I bring it to the Holy Spirit.

I used to have resistance to taking certain things, like a relationship or my health, to the Holy Spirit. I preferred the “illusion” of having control over it myself. Yet, I’ve learned that the only place where anything is safe is in our Inner Guide’s Loving Arms.  Don’t you think that the Holy Spirit will take better care of it than you will?

I’m a control freak in recovery. I used to chuckle thinking about the fact that if I consciously tried to control and do all that my liver does for my body, I’d be dead in 10 minutes. I don’t know how to do my liver’s job. Yet it is working all of the time, doing exactly what it is supposed to do. I simply need to let it be and not interfere.

The Holy Spirit does not need our involvement in fixing our own perceptions, just like our liver doesn’t need our involvement to do its job. All we need to do is step aside and LET BE. The Holy Spirit is asking us to bring our perceptions to it, so our perceptions can be exchanged for miracles. Our only task is to leave nothing hidden from the Holy Spirit. This is where the work needs to get done. This is the part we have to play.

Wherever life is tripping you up, it is doing so to keep you identified with the ego (aka your personal sense of limited self). Therefore, as the Course says, “Every situation properly perceived becomes an opportunity to heal the Son of God” (Original edition chapter 19, Part I, para. 2)

So look at whatever is coming up for you straight in the face, WITH the Holy Spirit. If something scares you, worries you, or challenges you, say to the Holy Spirit, “I’m willing to look at this WITH you.” Withhold nothing and look at it all.

Change does not need to be forced because you are exactly where you are supposed to be for your own growth and learning. By withholding nothing from the Holy Spirit, the layers of “issues” that we have simply begin to fall away. We find we don’t need them anymore as we learn who we TRULY are, which is not a body.

This is how we learn how to heal, because as we withhold nothing, we learn that we receive everything.