Pam Grout

Here’s to a different matrix of success

March 1, 2023 14 Comments

“Chasing wealth is not the answer. I’ve crunched the numbers. And sitting in a cheap fishing boat with my family is so much better than sitting on an expensive yacht.”—Nick Offerman

While I joyously soaked in Gandhi’s wisdom during the January retreat in Ahmedabad, India, I also learned about his protégé, Vinoba Bhave, whose book Moved by Love is one of many seeds I brought back with me.

I finished his book yesterday and can genuinely gush that I am now officially a Vinoba Bhave fangirl. He’s most famous for walking the length and breadth of India and inspiring wealthy landowners to give away 4 million acres of land to the less financially fortunate.

But the thing that most moved me was his approach to creating change, starting with a goal of freeing society from the bondage of money. I’m pretty sure Taz had a hand in this book coming my way.

Bhave was very clear that money is incapable of solving problems. Believing it is (and aren’t we sold that story from birth?) blinds us to real possibility. A revolution, he says, needs Spirit, not organization and structure.

One man, rooted in Truth (what Gandhi called ‘soul force’), is all that’s needed for Spirit to move, all that’s needed to create societal change. Bhave’s mission was to root out discrimination of every kind and for wealth and property to be shared by all.

I mean, who doesn’t want that really? It is only fear and our belief that we are separate that keeps that beautiful vision from being a reality.

Bhave was fearless. Because he knew he was more than a body, he had no need to protect it. Again, it’s the polar opposite of how we‘re trained from birth. He was able to give everything he had—his labor, his intelligence, his time and his thoughts–to this magnificent vision because he knew who he represented: the highest spirit in all of us.

Never did he coerce anyone to give up their land. In fact, he made it clear that if privileged landholders didn’t feel inspired to donate a piece of their property, he didn’t want it. He was giving them an opportunity. Because that’s what all of us really want—to give, to love, to make our hearts large enough to include everyone.

I could never repay even a fraction of the blessings I’ve been given in this lifetime, but at least I can share stories like this one. Hope you feel as inspired as I am right now. #222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest book, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World) that has just been turned into an app. Badass ACIM (badass-acim.com)

Happy 222! Celebrating possibility and miracles since 1993

February 22, 2023 74 Comments

“Let your broadcast of love bless the world.”—A Course in Miracles

Reading through E-Squared to update for the upcoming 10-year-anniverary edition, I was struck by the opening dedication: For Roosky. May your light forever shine.

Roosky, of course, is one of Taz’s gazillion nicknames: Taz-a-roo which led to Roosky which led to the dedication and my hope that the light and love she so clearly conveyed would bless the world. At the time, I was assuming its broadcast would continue here in the flesh.

But as Virginia Francess Sterrett said, “As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, you simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.”

That’s the goal of the Taz Grout 222 Foundation. Not so much to battle, because well, battling just keeps the crazy going, but to defy space and time by keeping alive Taz’s incredible light. Every year on February 22 (that’s today friends!), we give a gift to an innovative project or person with a big idea to change consciousness and therefore the world.

In times such as this, it’s vital to recognize that behind-the-scenes, beneath-the-news there’s a completely different story going on. There are so many of us who only want to love and serve and who really believe with our entire hearts and souls that a more beautiful world is not only possible, but is right now, as we speak, gathering breath.

As usual, the foundation got lots of great pitches for lots of worthy projects. And as always, I consulted Taz (I’m just her ground crew, after all) to finally settle on the following projects for this year’s 222 Foundation gift:

I. I have fallen in love with Bill and Pat Taylor who started the Southeast Asia Foundation to, as they say, give back to the Universe for the countless blessings they’ve enjoyed in their lives. Not only does every single penny go to their mission (all operating expenses come from their own pocket), but they show up themselves, boots on the ground, to make sure every one of their projects begins with and is guided by locals. They take their inspiration from Lao Tzu, insist on both sustainability and religious inclusion and act on the words from an oval river rock Pat once gave to Bill for his birthday: “You cannot do all the good the world needs, but the world needs all the good you can do.”

Thanks to Bill and Pat’s beautiful work (their tagline is “It takes a girl to raise a village”), the 222 Foundation has chosen to fund seven libraries in rural Siem Reap, Cambodia: four for kids, two for high schoolers, one for university students and one for the community. Taz LOVED books and worked at the Grinnell library when she was at university so having access to books, rare in rural Cambodia, is a must for promoting literacy and providing access to new possibilities.

We’re also funding a chess club and providing filters and fuel for water purification towers in Siem Reap. Mostly, we want Bill (he even shared a wonderful 222 story from when he was a 9-year-old Boy Scout) and Pat to know how much we appreciate their open hearts, generosity and unflinching belief that “it’s not merely about the money. It’s about each girl knowing that somebody some place in the world loves her and cares about her and encourages her to make something of her life.”

2. The other project Taz led me to support (isn’t she just brilliant?) is Craftroots, an artistan collective I was able to visit twice when I was in India last month. Once again, I fell in love with their mission. Yes, I fall in love A LOT!

Craftroots works with more than 17,000 artists in rural villages, keeping alive 72 ancient Indian arts and crafts. They aren’t out to scale their model or grow profits or production. Their aim is to bring a conscious shift in society by putting beauty into everything.

The artisans, mostly underprivileged women, aren’t viewed as laborers. Rather, they make up a sisterhood where each artist is genuinely respected, celebrated and encouraged to see their work as an offering to the divine—the divine in themselves and the divine in all life. Artisans pray together, read inspiring quotes each morning and focus on Truth: oneness, belonging and kinship.

Founder Anar Patel (to the right) also participated in ServiceSpace’s life-changing Gandhi 3.0 and says working with rural artisans is the greatest privilege of her life. She described it as her form of worship.

The 222 Foundation’s form of worship is looking for creative ways to burn through our culture’s prevailing trance of scarcity and lack and to provide a pinhole through which new possibilities and ways of being can shine. We are honored to support the above two projects and to remind everyone that there is light waiting for all of us to find. Happy #222!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World).

It’s my birthday and I’ll blog if I want to

February 17, 2023 67 Comments

“I was wise enough never to grow up.”–Margaret Mead

Just so you know, this is not a plea for birthday wishes. I already feel blessed by each and every one of you. I know (except when I occasionally get cranky) that I’m deeply loved and, if anything, I want to give birthday wishes.

Because that’s how it works. When we’re filled up with love, with the truth of who we are, it can’t help but gush over to everyone in our vicinity—even if it’s the vicinity of a blog. I write these posts for one reason. I love to write them. I do it for me.

And, yes, that’s another gravitational rule of life. When you do what you love most in all the world, it brings blessings to you AND spills on to others like an over-running cup.

When I blather on about the largesse of the world, I occasionally hear comments like “You’re out of your mind.” And I say, THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH!

My mind, as useful as it is, has never delivered much joy. It’s too busy keeping track of stuff, making to-do lists and filing all the reasons I should focus on the human meatball part of myself. But boy, when I get “out of my mind,” all I experience is joy and a beautiful awareness that I am so lucky to have occurred at all.

Today’s Course lesson is “There is nothing to fear.” So my third birthday wish for all of you is this: Get out of your fear-producing mind, recognize the Truth and enjoy a big honking birthday celebration on me. #222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World).

Here’s to a more spacious view

February 10, 2023 11 Comments

“Little by little, you will turn into the whole sweet, amorous universe. Love will surely burst you wide open into an unfettered, booming new galaxy.”—Rumi

Mention the word manifesting and most people think of material items posted on their vision board. To manifest, as popularly advertised, is to bring new cars or jewels or lovers into one’s life.

But manifest, in its true definition, means to create a field that makes something perceivable to the senses. Thoughts and beliefs have energetic patterns that create specific fields from the vast, unknowable, infinite potentialities that erupted along with the Big Bang.

The possibilities are way more than a tiny human brain (the reducing valve, as Aldous Huxley described it) can begin to understand.

Our brains take one microscopic facet of life (say, the human meatball named Pam), place it in the center ring and hitch everything to that 42-foot (the standard length of a center ring in a typical 3-ring circus) field.

Deep grooves of habit diminish the vastness, the spaciousness of what’s truly possible. My dear friend Bob and I were talking about the sheer ridiculousness of believing we understand anything.

Even science can only study the 4 percent of the universe that’s visible. The other 96 percent, the invisible energy we only surmise is there because of its gravitational influence on the four percent we do see, remains unknowable.

So the best we can do is build models or fields that manifest one particular limited reality. Every religion, every culture, every personality is nothing but a manifested field. And, thankfully, none of them are solid or permanent or really anything except a pattern that we manifest with our ongoing attention.

I guess where I’m going with this long, esoteric blathering is that while I’m here, interacting on this fragile zone of earth and sky, I intend to unhitch my attention from the limited center ring and focus instead on life’s incredible vastness, on its never-ending gifts. I mean what are the odds that this collection of subatomic particles that pretend to be Pam even occurred on this rocky planet? What an extraordinary gift!

So call this your weekly reminder that what is manifested now (what we see on the news, in the world) is nothing but a temporary field, one iteration of possibility. By simply removing focus from “what appears to be” and putting it on “what else might be?,” we can create a field that more closely resembles life’s Truth: love, nothing but love.

Before I let you go, I also want to mention that I met yesterday with the incredible Cherie Anderson who created this Sunday’s fundraiser for the Taz Grout 222 Foundation. She gave me a brief preview (including my small part) and let me just say, that it’s going to be the bomb. A love bomb! There’s going to be tapping and a love exercise from Mr. Rogers (yes, that Mr. Rogers) and well, I’m just happy she invited me along for the ride. If I understand correctly, Cherie chooses a different good cause every month and then hosts a mini, on-line workshop where all proceeds go to said good cause.

If you happen to have time this Sunday, check us out here. I’ll be there. I’m sure Taz will be there with her ginormous light and spirit. And, of course, the 222 love energy will be there.

Have a ridiculously remarkable weekend, my friends, and if happens to include this Sunday’s “Will You Be Your Valentine” event, I’ll see you there. #222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World).

There are only two options

February 5, 2023 25 Comments

“I belong to the Church of What’s Happening Now.”—Flip Wilson

Despite its wordy reputation, A Course in Miracles is overtly simple. Boiled down, it offers two options. You either live in love or you live in fear. That’s it. Those are your only choices.

And since fear is False Evidence Appearing Real, that shrinks your choices even further. You can’t NOT live in love. You can’t NOT be love. So choice B is an illusion.

The essence of your being is love. And there’s not one thing you can do to change that. Whatever you believe you might have done has absolutely no impact on who you really are.

And those other bozos out there? How you see them can also be effortless. At all times, they’re either offering love or they’re offering a call for love. And guess what? Since now you know your true identity (big, bounteous love), it’s easy to see right through their illusion.

The Course makes no bones. It offers unspeakable happiness. And all it takes is changing our minds about the world and about who we think we are.

Suffering is only possible when we believe the evidence the ego takes to the courtroom of our minds. But when you start to realize that its wildly creative, fear-based misinterpretation of the world has changed nothing, you’re free to announce case closed. Love is all that is.

The illustration for this post (today’s Course lesson, My holiness envelops everything I see!) was created by Alberto Agraso, an incredible illustrator originally from Spain, now living in Canada. I discovered this fabulous Course artist when he sent a proposal for this year’s 222 Foundation gift.

Although we’ve chosen a different candidate, I fell in love with his work and I’ve sent it on to my editor at Hay House in the hopes they can publish an illustrated book or a card deck, making the Course even easier to grasp. I did my bit to make its profound wisdom easier to digest in my book, The Course in Miracles Experiment, but now it’s Alberto’s turn to simplify it even more.

Thank you, Alberto, for being a bright light. And thank you everyone who offered such incredible ideas for changing the consciousness of the world. As always, the announcement for this year’s gift will be made on February 22 (2/22).

#222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World).

Upside down, flipped over, never the same

January 27, 2023 18 Comments

“It’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”–Bertrand Russell

British author Terry Pratchett once remarked that while most of us believe people (authors, poets, filmmakers) create stories, the truth is just the opposite.

Stories create people.

The stories we believe about ourselves and about the world shape us into the people we become. If we believe life is full of problems, we spend our lives solving problems. If we believe we are separate and alone, we fail to enjoy the deep connectedness in all of life.

The stories that wreak the most havoc are the subtle, cultural ones we don’t even realize we’ve subscribed to. The inherited perceptions we believe are absolute truth, unalterable, just the way it is.

As anyone who reads my work knows, I’m all about capsizing engrained stories. It’s the mission of the Taz Grout 222 Foundation. It’s why I begged my publisher to turn the pages of E-Cubed upside down. It’s my deepest prayer—that humanity will be released from all false stories of lack and fear.

In India, I experienced a completely overturned story that I will be musing about for the rest of my life. ServiceSpace that invited me to the Moved by Love retreat operates solely on the gift economy. That means everything is given out of love. There’s nothing transactional. Ever.

It’s so far removed from the accepted narrative that when I tried to pitch a story about it, my editor at People magazine couldn’t wrap her mind around it. “But how does it work?” she kept asking until finally concluding it had to be a fairytale and that I was missing something.

To be at the retreat was to witness insatiable generosity day after day, to enter a field where it’s safe to let your guard down, safe to wonder if, “Maybe this depth of kindness and care is actually human nature?”

It’s impossible to put this kind of experience into words. Words, after all, are a way of stopping possibility. Once you name something, it becomes that thing—no longer fluid, no longer bubbling with potential. It becomes difficult to “see” it any other way.

To state one small example: a tree. Is it simply a plant? A green blob with a brown stem (something kindergartners regularly draw)? Or, according to the capitalist story, a product we exploit for our own needs?

What if trees are trying to help us? I met several people at the retreat who regularly converse with trees including a prominent politician from Austria who finally left politics to do something he feels can better change the world. A Japanese calligraphy artist told the story of walking into a forest and having a particular tree say to her, “Hi! I’m Greege.” I think I might have the name wrong, but the tree definitely introduced itself and she has since met trees in three other locales (the California redwoods, for one) that she has introduced to each other. She and I decided we’d keep in touch by sending messages through trees from our respective homes across the planet.

All I know is that life is intertwined, interdependent and radiant with love.

We may think we’re trying to get something (a better job, more love, a bigger social media following), but the rock bottom truth is all we really want — the only thing we’ve ever wanted — is to give, to serve and to love with every fiber in our body.

Gifts keep pouring into my life including the opportunity to participate in this online “Be Your Valentine” fundraiser with all proceeds going to the Taz Grout 222 Foundation. Click here for the deets if you’re interested:

Have an amazingly awesome weekend, my loves. #222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World).

Forever moved by love

January 5, 2023 21 Comments

“Constantly focusing on the limitations, instead of all the possibilities, is how people become stuck in their lives. It only serves to recreate the same old reality from day to day. And soon the days turn into years, and lifetimes.” – Anthon St. Maarten

Glorious, gleeful 2023 to all you amazing, wonderful people.

You might have noticed I didn’t write a rah-rah, make this your best year ever post. Making solemn resolutions to grab 2023 by the kahunas, to my way of thinking, just generates a bunch of pressure I don’t need. Besides, life is already pretty incredible just as it is. To quote the wise sage Ferris Bueller, “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

In other words, my resolution, the same as last year and the year before that, is “to keep my eye on the ball.” And by that I mean to just be aware of whatever happens to be thrown my way.

I’m not particularly interested in orchestrating or curating life to my liking. I just want to stop and look around and really appreciate that, for whatever reason, I have been given this rare opportunity to be here and witness this unbelievable cosmic dance.

I’m presently in Mumbai, about to fly to Ahmedabad where I’ve been invited to participate in a Moved By Love retreat at Gandhi’s ashram. There’s no set agenda—just a bunch of folks getting together to “look around” and see what life is offering next.

So even though you may not get any love notes from me in the next couple weeks (that’s what these posts are, you know?), I’m sure you’ll feel the universal vibration we will be sending out.

The photo is yours truly last time I was in India and below is a video from a former MTV rap star who will also be here at the conference.

Keep looking around, my friends, and know that every single day is a gift. #222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World).

Confessions of a gratitude junky

December 28, 2022 49 Comments

“It’s the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused.”—Nell Zink

So I gave myself an incredible gift over the holidays. It did not feel like a gift at the time. But it so powerfully reinforced everything I believe that I’m hoping I shan’t (wow! Where did that word come from?) dig it up again.

For whatever reason, I decided to pull out one of my old, treasured stories. It’s an Oscar-worthy tale with lots of drama, plenty of pathos and my body knows exactly what to do with it, starting with manufacturing and dumping an assortment of stress chemicals.

I put everything I had into this oh-so familiar pity party. And sure enough, it demonstrated, once again, the power of thoughts and beliefs. Life itself is stunningly beautiful—except when we put ourselves in the prisons of certain stories and beliefs. Our stories do indeed create worlds.

So here is my thankfully short-lived holiday tale. Instead of celebrating and reveling in all the wonderful holiday memories I have with my beautiful daughter, I decided to pout about the unfairness of the fact she’s no longer here. I put all my energy into the story that this was my fifth Christmas without my favorite person in the whole wide world. You can imagine the result.

I was grumpy to my partner. I was withdrawn at his family’s Christmas Eve feast. In other words, I suffered because I fed a thought that doesn’t look reality straight in the eye. I know good and well Taz isn’t really “gone.” Heck, I still talk to her every day. I feel her presence around me. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have spent 25 years of my life with her Divine being, right here in the material world.

The old story is compelling. As sad stories go, it gets five stars. Unless you live in Ukraine or say, Somalia, it’s hard to find a tale that garners more sympathy. But why choose to forfeit right here, right now with a belief that causes suffering.

I know people will say, “but you have the right to your emotions!” and, yes, I believe I do. But I also believe I deserve happiness and that I can curate which stories I choose to water and grow in my consciousness.

I’m grateful for this experience that offered more proof that we do indeed create our reality. And I remain committed to life that’s happening right now in this beautiful, never-to-be repeated moment. #222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World).

Wishing you a ridiculously awesome winter holiday

December 22, 2022 46 Comments

“This life is a brief, ecstatic spark. Darling, fling yourself into the stars.”—Chelan Harkin

The headline for this post is a paraphrase of my new Consuela purse. My bestest friend, Mary, made a valiant effort to walk away when she first spotted it. But when she discovered that every single Consuela product bears the motto “Make Today Ridiculously Awesome,” usually hidden somewhere inside, she was left with no choice but to snatch it up and gift it to me.

The purse I now proudly own makes no pretense of subtlety. The life-affirming motto is plastered right there on the front in crazy wild neon. It represents my philosophy to a tee: joy, loud and proud, no matter what.

I know very little about this world, really. All I can be sure of is that this particular physical lifetime is fleeting and uncertain and well, why not make the most of every precious moment.

Is joy a crazy delusion? Or is it the underlying truth? The consciousness that goes on long after the body crumbles away?

I don’t know, but I have a hunch that love is the underlying reality of everything, that light exists in every being (whether apparent or not) and that all thoughts to the contrary are little more than a temporary broadcast that we can tune into or not.

I wish for each of you the broadcast of big ass, immutable love this holiday season. #222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World).

This year’s Nobel Prize proves our minds render reality

December 9, 2022 27 Comments

“Our willingness to place unjustified faith in immediate perception leads us to an inaccurate and starkly limited vision of reality.”—Brian Greene

This video of how we render reality was kindly sent to me by Michael Dawson of the Action Factory who recently interviewed me on his podcast. See how the figures suddenly pop up.

I was super jazzed to learn that the main tenet of my long-time spiritual squeeze (A Course in Miracles) was just awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics. The three physicists who landed the prize called it “experiments with entangled photons,” but to quote the Scientific American headline that announced it, “The Universe is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winner Proved It.”

What that means is that we, as observers, literally create the world from our minds. In other words, we’re not interacting with a fact-based world of material objects, but with our own perceptions. Yes, it appears that objects, our bodies, etc. are real and solid, but John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger, the Nobel award-winners, just proved the key supposition of quantum theory: that local realism is false.

This means that, when not observed, material objects are not there. Nothing exists until it is perceived. Like the first lesson of the Course says, “Nothing I see means anything.” And it goes on to say that I’m the one that gives everything I see its meaning.

This idea that nothing has a position until its observed has been a prediction of quantum theory for years, but it was so stunning that nobody could believe it to be true. It makes absolutely no sense. Even the scientists making the calculations figured there HAS to be a loophole. The Nobel committee, even though they didn’t like this crazy idea that the observer “creates” the “world,” finally consented to award the prize after Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger were able to eliminate every single escape clause.

What this means for non-scientists like me is that I literally render the world I see from my own consciousness. The nature of reality is defined by how I choose to look at it.

This is throw-out-the-streamers news because it means that the parody of life I’ve thus far created can be rewritten. Individual consciousness, profoundly limited by senses, egoic ideas and cultural messaging, can surrender and synchronize with a vastly greater reality. I mean, how cool is that?

We can literally render a different world. We can relinquish our minds, our consciousness, our beliefs to a reality that transcends time and space.

So that’s my science lesson for today, folks. As I repeatedly say, “Go out there and have the very best weekend of your life.” #222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World).