Course in Miracles – Pam Grout

Staying outside the loop

January 18, 2026 16 Comments

“The revolution isn’t out there. It’s in the 100,000 heartbeats you’ll have today, each one an opportunity to broadcast coherence or chaos into the shared field we all inhabit.”–Nipun Mehta

A question that was posed after last Friday’s post has stuck with me.

Lisa wanted to know how to use the “T’aint so” mindset while witnessing the current violence. I mentioned a couple thoughts in the comment section, but decided this very poignant question deserved a better answer.

I consciously choose to see beyond the violence. My focus is my unshakable belief that every single person has goodness inside them and that things always work out.

To question that unshakeable belief only causes decision fatigue. It causes me to doubt, to worry, to forget to be grateful.

So for me, it’s just a lot easier to focus on the ultimate truth. I don’t need multiple choice. I don’t need decision fatigue.

It might seem like a good use of time—it has certainly become a popular spectator sport—to keep tabs on what’s going on in the outside world. But for me, it only stokes the problem. Never once I have noticed my angst solving any problems.

To be totally transparent, I definitely have moments where I become obsessed, where I watch in sheer horror, but filling my noggin full of poison doesn’t get me where I want to go, doesn’t put me in a space of being the most effective person I can be.

So for me, focusing on just that one thing—gratitude that I live in a loving, perfect universe filled with loving, perfect friends—preserves my energy, my equanimity and keeps the channels open for guidance from the Dude.

Plus as today’s Course lesson points out, “I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my seeing.” So maybe today’s 100,000 heartbeats will resonant and add possibility to the shared field we all inhabit.

Have a great week, friends. I’ll be on the beach in Florida.

#222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 22 books including E-Squared, Thank & Grow Rich , The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World)and her latest, The Ego’s Playbook.

Returning my life to “upper management”

December 1, 2025 61 Comments

“What we’re trying to do is disassemble the ego so the radiance of Self shines through.”–David R. Hawkins

It’s here. It’s here!

In a memorable scene from Steve Martin’s 1979 hit, “The Jerk,” Navin, as Martin’s character is called, runs excitedly up to a delivery truck. He grabs a parcel, rips it open, begins jumping up and down and screaming, “The new phone book is here. The new phone book is here.”

That could well be me today, announcing that, after a five-year-hiatus, “my new book is here. My new book is here.”

After Taz died, I stumbled to get my writing career back in gear. I continued to write blog posts, as you undoubtedly know, but I experienced many false starts in continuing my previous book-a-year run.

So getting this book out feels like a significant victory. It’s different than my previous works, written from the voice of the saboteur inside our heads.

The Course in Miracles calls this disembodied voice “the ego” and says that as long as we mistake its message as truth, we miss the incredible aliveness that is our birthright.

Ego’s Playbook offers a graphic journey (think picture book for grownups) showcasing the ego’s many cons, its non-stop efforts to keep us from experiencing our true nature. It pokes fun at the ego and invites us to break free.

The bottom-line truth is that all of us swim in an ocean of abundance, peace and joy. We often roll our eyes at this suggestion because well, the voice loop in our head has convinced us otherwise.

At all times, we have unlimited access to universal intelligence, an ever-flowing fountain that we completely ignore because we’re stuck in ego structures and unconscious habits of feeling separate and limited and inferior.

Because our thoughts are SO powerful, they create a simulation in our lives that appears to defy Divine Intelligence. The key word here is simulation. It’s not real. It’s an illusion that, thanks to our creative force, appears strikingly true. That’s how much power we have.

Once we understand the ego’s tricks (as this book attempts to do), we can step away from the old story.

Taz came to me in a dream last night, gave me the biggest hug which I took as a sign to say, “mom, I love you and I am so happy you finally got this project out of the chutes. It’s time for you to get back out there and do your thing.”

So friends, I stand before you today with my pants down, as Keith Richards describes how he often feels on stage, announcing the debut of my new book.

#222 Forever!

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

More amor por favor

November 5, 2024 21 Comments

“To focus only upon doom is to become demonically obsessed, single-pointed and blind to the miraculous, the compassionate, and the fantastic.”—Elizabeth Gilbert

I took this photo in my local coffee shop this morning. Thought it merited a blog post.

Happy Tuesday, beautiful people! I decided this might be a good day to send out some love, to spread some good news and to remind myself (and anybody who happens to listen in) that anything is possible.

I’ve always viewed my writing as a way to sound the gong, throw the confetti, share stories that prove most of what we take for actual fact is a singular superposition in a field of infinite potentialities.

With that in mind, here are a couple stories that recently came my way:

Jelly Roll, before he was Jelly Roll, had, shall we say, a few run-ins with the law. In fact, by the time he was 15, he’d been convicted of armed robbery and, to this day, has a felony on his record.

Back then, he says, he was mad at life, mad at everybody. He was convinced he was a victim, believed every problem was somebody else’s fault.

It wasn’t until he finally decided to look at, as he says, “The Man in the Glass” that his life started to shift. When he began to recognize that he himself was creating it all, that he had the power to change his perspective, his entire world cracked wide open.

Today, he’s not only a Grammy-winning superstar, but he’s devoted his life to changing himself, making amends and helping others see the blamelessness within themselves. In fact, if you haven’t already, check out his amazing testimony to Congress:

The story that caught my eye is one that proves the Course in Miracles tenet that says: “The holiest of all spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.”

Today, Jelly Roll and the prosecutor who first convicted him have teamed up to create a program for at-risk and incarcerated youth in Tennessee’s Davidson County. These former enemies are now respected, loving colleagues. He has also become tight with the very sheriff who first locked him up in county jail.

So whatever enemy you think you have (for me, it’s often myself), just know that an open mind and being willing to take full responsibility can restore everything to wholeness, to a present love.

Second story pits statistics and probability against possibility. It involves a couple who tried for years to have a baby. They did the shots, the treatments, everything medical science could think to do.

Finally, their doctor threw up his hands and said, “I’m sorry. It’s not going to work. Your eggs are bad. You’re too old. Go to the adoption place. Here’s a flyer.”

They were about to adopt a baby from Honduras, were busy filling out the forms, getting the life insurance, doing the requisite blood work, when a phlebotomist came to their house and happened to ask, “Now, why am I taking your blood?”

When told the story about how the wife couldn’t get pregnant, the phlebotomist said, “Stop. Just stop.”

He took the guy’s hands, looked him in the eye and proceeded to do some kind of incantation.

After a few, “God is good. God is good,” he said, “It’s all done. Don’t worry about it. In a few months, your wife is going to tell you she’s pregnant.

“You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to tell your wife. It’s done.”

Three months later, his wife is pregnant. And, yes, they had a beautiful baby girl.

So folks, whatever story you believe to be true, whatever statistic seems like rock solid fact, never forget that, behind the scenes, there’s a bigger reality going on.

The world with which we’re most familiar (being a human, living in a body) pales in comparison to the infinite, utterly indescribable presence that’s just waiting to restore all that we’ve foolishly thrown away.

#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)

Ain’t too proud to beg

October 25, 2024 33 Comments

“I pray at the altar of imagination every day.”—Jason Reynolds

Today, I bring you good news/bad news. And, surprise, surprise, they’re one and the same.

Ready?

As humans, we create ceaselessly.

This is mind-blowing! Amazing! The most exciting reality we can know. We create with every thought.

That’s why every morning, I beg (maybe that’s a bit strong)..,I gently request that the universe, my cosmic concierge run the show.

Whoever controls the narrative wields the power. If the narrative we subscribe to is the material viewpoint, the one that suggests we are lacking, separate and limited, our ceaselessly creative thoughts are going to show us a rather frightening “reality.”

However, if we ask to be guided by the bigger thing, a beautiful, joyful freedom begins to arise.

Everybody claims they want to change the world. But the world is an idea, a narrative that forms from the thoughts and beliefs we dwell upon.

The world begins to change on its own once we refuse to live from false perceptions of brokenness, of scarcity. The world transforms magically when we ask the bigger thing to take the floor.

As the Course in Miracles continually reminds us, we are eternally blessed and sadly, most of us don’t even know it. The reason? The bad news narrative, the material viewpoint that prevails has us in its sway.

But it’s not true. We are NOT lacking. We are NOT separate. We are NOT without power. And once we ask for a wee bit of help, our powerful, unceasing ability to create begins to show us the joy, light and freedom to which we belong.

Happy Friday, gorgeous friends! Have the most stupendous, exciting weekend of your life.

#222 Forever!!!

Rewilding the mind

July 30, 2024 25 Comments

“If not for reverence, if not for wonder, why have we come here?”–Raffi

My guy, Alby, once described Mozart’s music as so pure and so ever-present in the universe that it was simply waiting to be plucked out by someone with a sympathetic ear.

That’s my overarching goal these days—to listen to the universe with a sympathetic ear. To hear, not with the dirty bathwater of my brain, but with the music that’s ever-present in the universe. I do this mainly by connecting to nature.

Truth is I’ve always been connected to nature (so are you, we all are), but because we pay so much attention to other things, we rarely notice. We focus on the file cabinet in our brain where we store grievances and beliefs that we just know are absolute fact.

The Course in Miracles is all about rewiring the mind—not the brain. The brain is basically a receiving device that, as I said, keeps files from the past. It superimposes old stories, old judgements on “the now.”

“The now,” for anyone who takes time to notice, is brimming with possibility. It hasn’t yet selected one out of the world’s gazillion trillion superpositions and named it fact. It hasn’t discarded all that’s possible for that one measly superposition.

True guidance doesn’t come from the brain, doesn’t rely on the three-pound blob of grey matter that plays nothing but old tunes from the jukebox of the past. The brain stores yesterday, ideas that were conjured up when we were two or ten or twenty-one.

My intention is to discard yesterday as any kind of guidance for today. And to recognize that the sights my brain shows me are nothing but a catalog of what used to be.

We might think our eyes show us the world as it is. But it’s been proven over and over again, that our eyes, mandated by the file cabinet of grievances called the brain, show us but a depiction of reality that we’ve long thought was true, but actually isn’t. It shows us a limited, inaccurate view of the world that’s so far from truth we can only laugh when we finally see it.

Rather than buy into the brain’s evaluation of good/bad, right/wrong and trust its depiction of the world, I prefer to close my eyes and FEEL the universe, to listen to the music of the spheres.

Have a stellar week, oh joyous ones.

Life is kinda stunning when you quit trusting the brain’s faulty wiring and listen, like Einstein said, with a sympathetic ear.

#222 Forever!

Relentless love, abiding peace and other facts of life

May 5, 2024 32 Comments

“Truth gives its strength to everyone who asks in limitless supply.”—A Course in Miracles

See that epigraph at the top of this post? The one promising limitless supply?

It’s the exact opposite of what most of us believe. Words like unlimited and infinite aren’t really included in the script we pick up at birth.

Which is why I’ve been tuning into a higher signal every morning, communing with a frequency that keeps pointing out that I’m cherished and adored exactly how I am.

We’ve all heard concepts like this, that we are nourished by an inner light, that joy is our natural state (heck, I’ve been writing about these ideas for twenty years), but the thing about starting each morning with the Two-Way is that is has moved from being a pleasant theory to a very present and direct experience.

The Cosmic Concierge with whom I consult every morning urges me to accept nothing less, nothing below 100 percent, undiluted, whole enchilada love. I am not a little bit loved. Or a little bit innocent.

It tells me that until I entertain no substitute for limitless, inseparable, immutable love, I will continue to see the world as less-than-perfect. Everything I see out there is a reflection of what I believe in here. Even if it’s a teeny, tiny speck of not-love, it clouds my vision of the world. It obscures life as it truly is.

And that’s why the Voice sometimes seems like a broken record. You are loved. Everything is okay. There’s nothing to fear.

Not long after I first shared the Two-Way, the wonderful writer and illustrator Sue Shanahan who once interviewed me for her porch light series (she also profiled Brandi Carlile, Martha Beck, Rainn Wilson, Dolly Parton and others) wrote to tell me about a similar project Elizabeth Gilbert was doing.

Every week on Elizabeth’s Substack, she writes a letter to herself from unconditional love, a practice she has been doing for decades. She also invites subscribers to submit their own letters from unconditional love. So if any of you want to take it further than the 30-day experiment I proposed here, I invite you to check out Liz Gilbert’s “Letters from Love.”

I’m finding it inspiring and beautiful. (I already adored Liz’s books) And well, her project reinforces the idea that life is speaking to all of us, that it will never stop reminding us to listen to our hearts, to let its still, small voice offer refuge from past beliefs, old injuries and outdated scripts. Thank you, Sue, for pointing me in Liz’s direction.

Today marks 30 days (and it’s okay to start any time) of the experiment I invited you to try. I’d love to hear how it’s going in the comments section below. I’m especially interested if, like Father Bill W. promised, that once you log 30 days in a row, you’d never dream of going solo again. I know I’m quite relieved to accept help from a generous and relentlessly chatty universe.

I love you all and I hope you remember that being human is something we experience, not who we really are.

#222 Forever!

Wrong is not a thing

April 8, 2024 60 Comments

“God does not share these weird beliefs with you.”—A Course in Miracles

Another “find” from my road trip to Iowa.

I LOVE road trips with all my heart. I love seeing new sights, experiencing new places and finding things I had no idea even existed.

This weekend’s version included stumbling on to Free Cookie Friday, meeting a delightful Jamaican expat who runs a food truck in tiny Lamoni, Iowa and hiking across a high trestle bridge. And that was just the first few 24 hours.

Road trips also have a way of pushing the limits of what I’m able to imagine. All of us are shaped by what we perceive, what we allow ourselves to see. And once we define something, we’re blinded to the bigger truth of it. We literally reduce our apertures.

What I’m finding in my morning practice is that with a slight shift in awareness, the narrow band of awareness widens. I notice the whole world starting to hum.

It’s also becoming clearer to me that life doesn’t have to be the way we think it is. The division, the wars, the greed is just one system, one way of understanding the world. It’s far from a complete picture. Quite easily, we can begin to transcend this particular way of thinking.

And it starts with knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way. How often do we shrug and think, “Well that’s just the way it is.” “That’s just the way our system works.”

But is it really that way or have we limited what we can perceive?

The practice I’m doing now is opening a portal to something bigger. This Voice, as I guess I’ll call it today (I was relieved to recently learn that Hindus have 330 million different names for God) isn’t so much about getting answers, but about feeling a connection, a Divine Buzz, a different way of seeing the world.

The reason I chose the above headline is because I want any of you who are trying the 30-day experiment to know that there is no right or wrong way to do it. Wrong and right are just concepts that live in that narrow band of perception.

Happy Monday, friends!

#222 Forever!

Safe in a world that loves and protects me

March 8, 2024 42 Comments

“If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”—Leonard Cohen

Albert Einstein is reported to have said that the most important decision anyone can make is whether or not they live in a friendly universe.

One of the gazillion reasons I practice what I call ferocious gratitude is because it allows me to live in a friendly universe. It enables me to see every person as a friend, every situation as happening for my good.

It grants me the privilege of stepping out into the world expecting things to always work out for me. No matter how it might appear.

I’ve been thinking about my early travel days before cell phones provided we wayfarers with non-stop contact, GPS and all sorts of perceived safeguards.

No matter what situation I found myself in, things had a way of always working out. Even the time I landed in Germany without knowing how to reach the friend I was staying with. Or the time I lost my motorcycle key in the Greek ocean. Or the time I was left in the middle of the north island of New Zealand by a boyfriend who decided he didn’t like me anymore.

I’m not suggesting I didn’t panic a time or two. Especially in countries that converse in different languages. But always, 100 percent of the time, it worked out.

What I now know for sure is that there is a life force that always looks out for me. Like today’s Course lesson says, “I am safe in a world which protects me and loves me.”

This force, this guidance, this love will never abandon me. And the only reason some of you might be rolling your eyes and sarcastically thinking, “Right, Pam” is because you don’t yet trust how supremely loved you are.

Fear is the ONLY THING that can ever get in the way of this non-stop loving care. Worry, disbelief and all its mean girl cousins can block the awareness. But it’s never not available.

Once you come to trust this fact your whole life changes. You know that everything you could ever need will be rolled out before you like a gorgeous Persian carpet.

Last summer, when I was in Spain, my sister, my Mister and I lost the keys to our apartment. This is something I’m known to do, but let’s just say my compadres freaked out just a tad little bit. We were at the beach, we had left our phones, our money, our credit cards in the apartment and well, nobody on that beach in southern Spain spoke anything but their native language. And my months of Duolingo hadn’t covered, “Help! I’m currently penniless in your country.”

For a short frantic time, as we pawed through the sand, I was pretty curious how we were going to access our place again. Especially since the phone number of the mighty companions who had so generously offered us their beautiful pad on the beach was dutifully entered in the cell phones back in the apartment. They were in Canada, we knew no one else, and, well, all rational reasonable people would have believed we were screwed.

Except I had a quiet confidence (from years of accessing that friendly universe) that somehow this, too, would work out.

Eventually, of course, like Max from the Where the Wild Things Are, we sailed across years, across days and back into our very own apartment where–maybe not hot dinner–but our phones, our money and our credit cards were waiting for us.

We might think these man-made conveniences provide some sort of safety net. But truly, friends, our real security, our real peace of mind come from the ever-so beneficent universe that waits patiently for us to release our fears and come back home.

Once again, dear mighty companions, have the very best, the most astonishing weekend of your lives!!

#222 Forever!

Human brain: master of deception

January 4, 2024 33 Comments

“Draw a boundary and then erase it. Because it is a fragment of your imagination.”—Buckminster Fuller

This was one of three hedgehogs Taz and her many emissaries sent my way on January 1. Bodes well for an extraordinarily epic year!!!

For those who might be wondering, I began Lesson 1 of A Course in Miracles on January 1, as I do every year.

And it’s not because I’m a slow learner (although, admittedly, that could figure in), but because I love the daily reminders of the world’s “indiscriminate generosity.”

I love hearing again and again that my fleeting, anxious thoughts mean nothing. (That happens to be today’s lesson).

I love being reminded that my piddly fears were created by a blob of goo in my head that evolved, not to produce genius or peace, but to regulate my body.

The brain’s grand productions (thoughts, feelings, senses) are patterns that come with the job of keeping the body in check. They don’t begin to show the boundless, astonishing energy field in which we live. The Gospel of Thomas says it like this: “infinite love is spread out upon the earth and men don’t see it.” To which I will add, thanks to the reducing valve known as the brain.

The Course offers a seismic shift in the way we perceive the world. By changing our perceptions, we literally begin to live in a different world. As the Course says, “In this world, the unconditional care of God (the Dude, in my lingo) becomes our experiential reality and the worldly assaults fade into insignificance. We are carefree and know we are taken care of. Anxiety is replaced with celebration.”

One of the things I’m celebrating is the amazing, brilliant people I get to meet, one of whom called me a “messenger” yesterday. This is after I balked at her insinuation that I was a teacher. Again, I don’t see myself as a teacher, but rather a person who likes to share her toys.

Her story, a perfect example of the guidance we can expect once we give up our patterned thoughts, is so cool I thought I’d share it here. About a year ago, she started getting a nudge to leave her job and move abroad. She wisely said, “Okay, show me!” No sooner did she consent to listen than she was further guided to move to France.

France? I think I might have gone back to my regulated thought patterns at that point, the ones that insist “that sounds like a lot of trouble.”

But she surrendered and kept tuning in to her guidance. The moment she committed, she started meeting people from….France, started noticing doors opening up. Everything proceeded with ease and grace. That doesn’t mean the brain didn’t try to chime in. But she knows better than to attend to its pointless preoccupations.

So in about a week, she is moving to the south of France where she will be conducting the event we’re doing from her NEW HOME.

I love how easy life can be when we let go of the patterned perception fed to us by our brains. The Course helps us loosen the chains and transform all limited beliefs.

Here’s to a 2024 free of all misguided beliefs and ideas.

#222 Forever!

Just call me Dory

November 14, 2023 34 Comments

“Forgiveness is your number one dance move.”—Maria Felipe

I was flipping out Sunday at one of my possibility posses, raving about a particular line from a recent Course lesson that I must have read at least 43 times. How did I fail to notice this before?

I compared myself to Dory from Finding Nemo, needing to be reminded again and again of something I knew, something I thought I’d mastered.

P Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way.

My boos from the posse, who also dug the line, asked me to send it to them. So even better, I decided to write this post about the stunning reminder that, more than anything, forgiveness means breaking mechanical patterns of thought. And that if I really want a future different from the past, I need a brand, spanking new perception, free from unconsciously adopted beliefs and behaviors.

The line that jumped out is this: “The future now is recognized as but an extension of the present.”

We actually wake up every morning expecting more of the same. We live in an always-evolving, intensely loving and creative energy field and we tend to see nothing but the tiny wave of perception we collapsed years ago, mostly revolving around scarcity, limitations and fear.

Because our thoughts and beliefs are such powerhouses, we continue to create our worlds from this outdated information. We continue to see our lives as what we believed them to be yesterday.

And that’s where forgiveness comes in. Where surrender comes in.

If we can completely let go of every single thing we believe to be true and decide to trust — not in our intelligence or our education, but in life as it really is without the blinders, a new reality can begin to unfold.

We begin to recognize that our true nature is happiness. And that once we decide to trust, life works in our favor, people prove trustworthy, news events that seem to repeat themselves can begin anew.

Maybe Dory is actually wiser than all of us. She doesn’t need a past. Or an old story that limits or defines her.

So Dory, here’s to you and a new possibility with the rise of every morning sun.

P Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way.

And #222 Forever