Please note, this is an automated transcript so it is not 100% accurate.

Emily:
There is a light within all of us. It’s a light that the world can’t see, but if you open your spiritual eyes, you can see it. And so I was determined to uncover that light within myself. And then the practice of the Course is seeing that light in everyone. To be a Course student is that you look beyond another person’s body, beyond their ego, beyond their personality, beyond their behaviors to the truth of who they really are. And it’s on that basis that you forgive, that you heal, that you do therapy, that you pray.

Guy:
Hey, hey, hey, Guy here. Welcome to my podcast. And my beautiful guest today is Emily Bennington Perry. And I absolutely love this conversation. She is a sweetheart and the real deal. I invited her on the show to discuss A Course in Miracles, which is I knew nothing about, to be honest with you. And not only do we discuss A Course in Miracles and how it’s impacted Emily’s life, We also discuss her own journey and her own spiritual awakening and her own transitions through many metamorphoses of life, which I feel that we can all relate to. And if you listen to the entire podcast today, I have no doubt you will get a lot out of it. And if you are watching on YouTube, be sure to let me know in the comments below what you got out of the conversation today. And let me know where you are in the world as well. It’s nice to connect, share this with a loved one. as if you continue to support me, it allows me to help reach more people that I feel are in real need to hear these conversations. So it’s always deeply appreciated. And just a heads up as well, I’m recording this in February 2024. Our retreats are coming up through 2024. They’re all locked in So we’re going to be in Bali in June for six days of Mastering the Inner Mystic. I’m so excited. It’s about half full already. So if that tickles your fancy and you want to come and meet us in person and come and join us, then fly into Bali. It’ll be amazing. It’s going to be in Ubud. We’re going to be in Croatia towards the end of the year in October for a five day retreat as well. And of course, for anyone in Australia, we are running a retreat in May as well this year in northern New South Wales, about 45 minutes from the Gold Coast. course. So look for Live and Flow Retreats or check out the links below to find out more. Anyway, let’s go over to Emily. Enjoy this podcast. It’s beautiful. Much love from me and I hope to meet you in person someday soon. Beautiful. Emily, welcome to the podcast.

Emily:
Thanks so much for having me.

Guy:
It’s funny. Yeah, we’ve been chatting for nearly 15 minutes off air and it’s like, wow, we’ve got to get this on podcast. I think it’d be quite phenomenal where this can go today.

Emily:
Hopefully the best stuff wasn’t before we hit record.

Guy:
I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt it. My first question to you is, let’s just say you’re on an airplane and a complete stranger sits next to you and asks you what you do for a living these days. What would you say?

Emily:
Oh, that is such a tricky question. I usually start with, have you heard of A Course in Miracles? And nine times out of ten, someone will say no. And I say, I run a nonprofit that teaches forgiveness. And then I’ll say something like, and the world can use more of that, huh? And then they’ll start talking about forgiveness. And if they’ve heard of A Course in Miracles, well, then I say, well, what have you heard? And then we start to have conversation about the course. And then I tell them that I run a nonprofit that has the mission of sharing the course in the world and building a tradition around it.

Guy:
Yeah, incredible. It’s fascinating. Like we were talking off air, I’m not that familiar with A Course in Miracles, but through my own journey, it’s been ever-present. And there’s a book, A Course in Miracles, on my bookshelf that my wife has sitting there as well. And I’m fascinated to learn a little bit about your journey as well, because clearly talking off air, you’ve certainly been on quite a spiritual quest, I think, for yourself and to support others at the same time. Where did that start for you? Were you always familiar with A Course in Miracles, or is it something that just came onto your radar?

Emily:
No, I’ve always been into spirituality. I grew up a Christian and grew up with the best possible version of Jesus, so I didn’t have any of the fundamentalist evangelical Christianity. I had the love your enemies, peace Jesus, hippie Jesus. And so I grew up with that, loved that, but didn’t find that it was nourishing enough for me in my life. And then when I was in my early 30s with two young children, I hit kind of those proverbial bathroom floor moments and said, I need to find a better way to live. I had gone through a kind of a dark period in my life and it was affecting my children, it was affecting my marriage. And one day my son said to me, mommy, you make me sad. And I was like, oh my gosh. And I said, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’ll fix it. And that was January of 2014, 10 years ago. No, sorry, that was January of 2011. And then I found the course in March of that year. And so I got into the course, really started studying it at that point. And then in January of 2014, I experienced a purple light that took over my vision. I kept, no matter what I would do, and I would close my eyes, this purple light would be there, vivid purple pulsing light. And I heard the voice teach in my head, really, really loud, teach, it wouldn’t leave me alone. And so at that point, I knew that I was meant to teach. I’d had the course for a couple of years. I knew I was meant to teach the course at that point, and things just unfolded from there. The course has always been a big part of my life, my spiritual path, from the moment it showed up in my doorstep.

Guy:
Wow. So in those couple of years before the word teach came and the purple light appeared, How are you applying it? Would it be just you just read a chapter and then actually apply it in your day? Because I think one of the hardest challenges is for us humans is to take the knowledge that we listen from a podcast, that we read from a book and whatever it might be, but actually apply it in our lives and start to lean it, lean into faith, lean into surrender and feels like what it means to actually let go and actually trust that there’s something bigger supporting us.

Emily:
Yeah, well, for me, once I got the course, it was a solo journey for a long time. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about building community around the course now, because I know what a complex, lonely journey it can be. And so from when I got it in 2011 to when I saw the Purple Light and heard Teach in 2014, I was just doing my best in the book by myself. And the way that I tried to apply it was I knew that it was truth. So I got nerdy, I guess is the best way to say it. I got really, really into reading it all the time. And what I discovered from the Course is that there is a light within all of us. It’s a light that the world can’t see, but if you open your spiritual eyes, you can see it. And so I was determined to uncover that light within myself, and then the practice of the Course is seeing that light in everyone. And so the short version of what it is to be a core student is that you look beyond another person’s body, beyond their ego, beyond their personality, beyond their behaviors to the truth of who they really are. And it’s on that basis that you forgive, that you heal, that you do therapy, that you pray. And so I knew, I got at the very beginning that there was that light. in everyone, that light in me and that light in others. But what’s happened since then is I’ve only gone deeper in understanding all the components of that and how to share this path.

Guy:
Yeah, beautiful. So by the time you heard that word teach and that visual come in, was that a surprise to you? Or was it normal? I was. It was like, holy moly, what’s going on here? Because I remember my first experience. You’re right.

Emily:
I was going to say, you had a very similar experience because when you were talking about your Kundalini awakening, I said, was that something that you were seeking or was it something that spontaneously happened? And it was the same thing with me. I was just bebopping around and all of a sudden the voice came first and it was very, very loud and booming in my head. Although, It didn’t hurt. You know, when you hear a big boom outside, you cover your ears immediately. And it was loud, but it didn’t hurt. And so I had never experienced anything like that before. And you know what? I haven’t experienced anything like that since. So once I started teaching, the voice went away, the booming voice went away, and I haven’t heard it in 10 years.

Guy:
So here’s the other question for you then, which is that when you hear that, what were you doing as your day job and was that transition to teach? Scary for you.

Emily:
Yeah. Interesting question because I was a author at that point. I was writing career books and I was a mindful leadership coach. And so I loved what I was doing and I felt like I was doing something with meaning and purpose. Helping people with mindfulness was fulfilling for me because when you can help someone learn how to respond to what happens to them versus react, then obviously their behaviors are more wise. And I was having a lot of success with that, and I was happy. And when I heard teach and saw the purple light, I knew God was coming for my career. I knew I was supposed to transition from teaching mindfulness to teaching the Course. And there was an interim period where I tried to bargain with God, where I was like, okay, I’ll teach the principles of the Course if you just let me call it mindfulness, because I was kind of doing that already. I was teaching mindfulness, but infusing it with Course principles and not really saying that that’s what I was doing. And so I was making these deals with God, like, let me teach the course, but let me call it mindfulness. And he wasn’t having it, the voice wouldn’t go away. And so eventually I said, okay, well, if this is God, and I knew it was, if this is God, I will be taken care of. And I trusted, jumped off the cliff, you know, left my mindfulness career, started teaching the course. And honestly, I’ve never been happier.

Guy:
Amazing. How would you define God? I only raise it because that word used to be triggering for me actually before I leant into all of this.

Emily:
Yeah, God is triggering for a lot of people. If you’ve grown up with an authoritative, wrathful, angry version of God, then people are on the run from that, there’s a ton of spirituality that is just filled with being on the run from God, right? Like wanting to neuter God, wanting to make ourselves God so that he becomes more palatable, right? The way that I define God is that he is unconditional love stretched to infinity. And what that means is take the most, I know father’s a triggering word for people too, but just take the most loving ideal of a parent and stretch that all the way into infinity. No one does anything that ever deserves his wrath. God can’t conceive of wrath. God doesn’t forgive because he doesn’t condemn. And that’s God. Unconditional love. No one’s outside the circle.

Guy:
Beautiful. Do you believe that we can be in a state of unconditional love?

Emily:
I believe that’s what we’re meant to be and do here. Yeah, absolutely. I think that we’re not equal to God. I think that He created us. We didn’t create Him. However, in creating us, we get His attributes. One of them is love. And so at our core nature, the essence of who we are is love. And what we’ve done is block it with all of our hate and anger and grievance and unforgiveness and the work of spirituality. No matter what path you’re on is to release those blocks to the awareness of your true nature, which is love.

Guy:
Beautiful. So then as we come back and hold a state of love, we are then recognizing the divinity within us and absolutely living from that place and a thousand percent. Yeah, and I always remember hearing many years ago on one of the podcasts, too much information, but anyway, we only see the world equal to how we feel in any given moment. And so if we really want to see a loving world, we have to feel it first within ourselves and be that

Emily:
I think that’s true. And I think our feelings come from our thoughts. And so the practice of changing your thoughts can change how you feel that in turn changes how you behave. And so one of the reasons why I’m really into the course is because it’s got a whole workbook on how you change your thinking to be more in alignment with higher principles. And when your thinking is in more alignment with higher principles, your feelings follow and your behaviors follow from there.

Guy:
Yeah, no, absolutely. The thinking and feeling loop, I see it in my mind now. We always think equal to how we feel, and then we start to feel equal to how we’re thinking, and on and on. The merry-go-round goes so often. I’m fascinated, before we dive into a little bit more of The Course in Miracles, I’m fascinated on your personal journey as well, because you spoke, and I had no idea we’d be talking about this, because I mentioned the shamanic journey as well, offline and things like that, and you spoke about your exploration as well. And I’d be interested to know what led you to look at that and what was your experiences like with it as well?

Emily:
So we were talking about being on a medicine retreat, ayahuasca retreat for me. And one of the reasons why I went into that a few years ago, it was 2018, I believe. Yeah, 18. And one of the reasons why I went into it is because I genuinely believe that psychedelics under the right circumstances and with the right shaman, I had a shaman, in the right environment, right set and setting, ceremony, I think they can be, the word that’s coming to me is not elegant, but it’s a hack to higher consciousness. And what they can do, again in the right setting, is to take us places that we can’t get to on our own. Places that exist, you know, but we just are blocked with the limitations of our own brain. and being in these bodies. But those experiences are there. And those with great spiritual gifts can touch them and bring them here to us. But I think the medicine experience can get us there for those of us who don’t have that great gift. And so that was my experience. I had an incredible incredibly profound, life-changing experience in that retreat where, I don’t, I mean, how much do you wanna?

Guy:
No, please, please share. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Emily:
I know everybody has their own experiences and everybody’s experience thinks, everyone thinks that their experience is so fascinating. Meanwhile, everyone’s having similar experiences because everyone’s able to touch that place. But I’ll just shrink it down to this. What I saw was very similar to what people experience in NDEs. So when you have an NDE experience, oftentimes people will come back and say that they saw God as some big golden glowing orb. I saw that. And it was the unconditional love that you hear about poured on to me. But what was really interesting about it was that I felt like God kept saying, I know you, but He wasn’t saying it to Emily, even though I was the one standing there. He was saying it to something before me. It was something that I had been before. And so I felt like that was real for me. And what was also really interesting is that a couple years later, so in 2023, I got married, and on my wedding day, I had always carried that experience of the retreat, of a visceral feeling of God. That’s what you want in a retreat like that. If you’re looking for a spiritual experience, you don’t get higher than a visceral experience of God. That’s what I feel like I had. And so I’d always been carrying it with me, but I’d carried it with a slight bit of disappointment that it wasn’t me he was looking at. It was something that I was once before. And so on my wedding day, I was, this is March of 2023, and I’m meditating in the morning and I get this other download, no medicine, no nothing, right? in the morning. And I get this full experience, same kind of love coming in. And he says, I know you, but this time I feel it and it’s just me. It’s not going through me. It’s just me. And my husband and I have always said that was my wedding gift from God. I’ve never told anyone that story. I don’t even think I’ve told my best friends that story. But yeah.

Guy:
Wow, it’s beautiful. No, I’m listening and I can so relate to everything that you just said. And from my experience of only doing the Ayahuasca journey once 10 years ago now, it gave me a new vantage point and a new experience and a new reference point to what’s possible. But the one thing that was clear for me when I came out of that, and I had a similar experience where I became the universe, and I actually got shown around, it was quite phenomenal. And I also was shown all the different spectrums of emotions, and it actually took me through them all for me to experience how they all serve, and they’re all very relevant in context of how we live life. And I came out of that just going like, oh my God, because I hadn’t really been meditating.

Emily:
There’s so much more here than we know.

Guy:
Yeah. I’m such a speck. It’s not funny. But what was clear for me was to then go on my inner quest by myself, not by more journeys, not by more. I had tools, I guess, to get there, but it was very clear to me, there was this knowing that it’s like, okay, so this is possible. Is this now possible just by my own journey? I’m sorry, please go ahead. Yeah, so then it became a nurturing of bringing that divine essence of who I am daily in me, and it wouldn’t leave me alone. Every conversation, every person, I’m like, it was just this drumbeat that was sitting with me the whole time. And yeah, my life.

Emily:
That, to me, is the best possible use of medicine. And I know there’s been so much conversation around the whether we should use psychedelics in therapy and how we should use it in spirituality, and I’ll let the experts figure all of that out. I don’t recommend casual use of this at all. But what I have seen is that if you’re in the right set and setting with the right guide, your experience is the ideal, where you can just have even just one experience in your life where you can see, you can touch what’s possible. And then that becomes part of your every day. You once you see something like that, you can’t go go backwards. You know, it’s real. And so you bring that reality into your everyday interactions. And what you find is you’re less triggered by the small stuff because you’re like, there’s so much bigger, so much more going on here. And you can live with an assurance that you’re okay. Even if you’re outside of this body, if this body dies, you will go on. And that’s what these experiences can offer.

Guy:
Totally. And there was a couple of other lessons. I’ll share them if you don’t mind. There was one gentleman there, his name was Rory, I’ll never forget. And he was a complete stranger. And the amount of care, love and compassion that guy showed for me, you know, in a group with other people was incredible. And that really sat with me from that, like, wow. just to have a complete stranger do something like that, who was volunteering his time. And being there, that was like a real pure essence of wanting to make the world a better place, you know? And so that sat with me too, as well as the journey from that whole time. And like you say, once I started experiencing more and more, it was clear for me that it’s like, how can I start to bring something together where people, if they want to touch or feel or experience that, if they’re willing to lean into themselves and work through the blocks and different things, that it is possible.

Emily:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, you can get there with meditation if you do enough of it. Actually, some people have really good, spontaneous, amazing meditations where they can touch it and then your heart opens up and you realize, oh my God, what we’re doing here is nothing compared to that. That’s the show. What you touch there, that’s the show, that’s what’s really going on. And the work is bringing the love from there, here, into this world that desperately needs it.

Guy:
So I think the greatest challenges for for people, and it was for me, is that if you have an experience, you don’t know, so how do you know? And that’s where I feel frameworks and things to really help us understand and practices can come in, too. But we have to start to lean in and trust in that, that it will lead us somewhere, as opposed to, you know, we gotta let go at some stage to trust it, right?

Emily:
Yeah, I’m a big practice person, though. I am, I am all for the experience hacks, to use that inelegant term again, but I’m also all for the daily work of a spiritual practice. And in the course, what that means is you get up, you do your meditation, you read your lesson or your section, you have a practice line, and you stick with that line all throughout the day, and you’re building that muscle so that when life throws whatever life throws at us, you can respond with love. So that’s the work of a spiritual practice and I think that’s essential and cannot be overlooked or ignored.

Guy:
Yeah, a thousand percent. So who wrote The Course in Miracles? Where did it come from?

Emily:
A Course in Miracles was scribed by a psychologist in New York named Helen Schochman with assistance from her colleague Bill Thetford. It came from 1965 to 1972 through a inner dictation from a voice that claimed to be Jesus. And did you know that part about the course?

Guy:
Yeah, I heard part of it, but I’ve purposely not leaned into it too much because of today.

Emily:
Well, if I’m at my children’s PTA meeting, that’s not the thing I lead with when I talk about the Course. But if you really get into the teachings that we know are authentic from Jesus 2,000 years ago, so much of what has been ascribed to him isn’t what he said. You can get into the scholarship and all of that to confirm what I’ve just said. But what we can trace to him is mainly the Sermon on the Mount. And those are his most beautiful teachings. Those are loving your enemy, going the extra mile, all of that. And so what we can surmise is that Jesus was a wisdom teacher of love, right? He’s not the sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty and judge everybody. He was a teacher and he taught unconditional love and he was a healer. And so if you are familiar with his teachings, you can see so much of him in A Course in Miracles. And so I really do. It sounds It’s even hard for me to get it out, but I really do believe that the Course is the second coming of Jesus in the world.

Guy:
Yeah, it’s no surprise, though, to me. I’ve had people that channel on this podcast. I’ve been curious. I’ve read many books. I’m currently reading Mary Magdalene manuscripts, a channel text from Mary Magdalene, because she’s been showing up in my work. So I’m just curious, because I don’t know their teachings. I wasn’t brought up actually religious, so I’m kind of like a blank slate. So I feel like there’s an exploration for me to start to understand this, but maybe from a different perspective than just what’s been passed down from generation to generation, and maybe lost in translation along the way as well.

Emily:
So what are you learning from what’s coming through?

Guy:
So, I’ve only just started the book, but from Mary Magdalene, she was part of ISIS, so there’s a part in Egypt that she was learning alchemy. and through the alchemy of transmuting energy to actually bring more prana in, to bring higher states of awareness and consciousness. She was paired with Jesus Christ, and they would actually then bring in their teachings throughout different countries on the land. That’s as far as I got to so far within it. That’s a broad stroke, but it’s fascinating to me that the general theme is of love and actually us recognize the divinity within ourselves. That’s as clear as day. And to me, that makes complete sense. So

Emily:
It does. And one thing, one marker of Jesus is concern for the other too. So I think that for me, one of the incredible parts of the course is how much we are concerned with other people. And that is missing to some degree in contemporary spirituality. It has been co-opted by a focus on one’s self and using spiritual tools to manifest the life of your dreams and that kind of thing. What I think we’re here to do as a spiritual community, regardless of what path you’re following, is to bring higher wisdom to earth, and it can’t be considered higher wisdom unless it’s rooted in love towards others. And that’s how it comes back to you. How you love yourself is you love everyone else. And in return for healing them, you heal yourself. And so for me, any kind of marker of channeled work and contemporary spirituality, if it’s not focused on love and service, devotion to other people as the way that we heal ourselves, then yeah, I feel like that’s the marker of true wisdom.

Guy:
Yeah, beautiful. No, that’s a really good point. It’s interesting where the ego can muddy the waters. And even on my own understanding and learnings, I’m constantly kind of questioning and self-analyzing.

Emily:
The ego can make its own goals seem very spiritual.

Guy:
Yeah, yeah. How do you work with your ego? How would you describe the ego? or to be aware of?

Emily:
The way that I would define the ego is that it’s the small separate self that is attacking. So it’s whenever we want to separate and attack in order to be above. And so that is the root of all the conflict in our world, isn’t it? When we attack, we want to be above. And whenever we’re attacking, we’re coming from an ego place. And so that’s how I would define the ego. And how I work with it is I don’t. So, let me just define what I mean by that. I think that there is parts of contemporary spirituality that focus on the ego as the thing that keeps us safe in a dangerous world. I feel like the ego, well, the course says, the ego is not the thing that keeps us safe in a dangerous world. The course says that the ego is the thing that makes the world dangerous. And so our job isn’t to learn how to dance with our ego better to bring it in and use its ability to navigate through the world. We are to look at it, see it for what it is, incredibly ugly. It is always going to be out for itself at the expense of someone else, always. And so our job is to get rid of it to the extent that we can. And that’s what, back to Jesus, that’s what he demonstrated was a radical egolessness in the world. And that’s what we’re meant to do as well, to get rid of the ego. and to be in that state of unconditional love because the ego is the block to that state.

Guy:
Right, because I was going to say the challenge is if we’ve never experienced that unconditional love to that point where you say you’ve reached a higher state of being, and if our life is full of trauma and people around us reflecting a very different world to what is possible. It obviously can be very challenging to start to work with that. And I guess that’s why people have to go through so much pain before they decide to enough is enough.

Emily:
Well, you don’t have to touch that state of unconditional love or higher truth to know how much pain the ego causes us in our lives. You don’t have to touch that state to know that when you are in a state of hatred, anger, judgment, grievance, we know what that does to ourselves. We know what that does to our mind. We know what that does to our relationships. And so really, if you can say the ego is the thing that’s causing all of that pain, then again, you don’t need to go on a medicine retreat to know you want to get rid of that thing that’s causing you all this pain.

Guy:
Why is then Forgiveness, the backbone of the book, because you mentioned forgiveness is really the crux of the work.

Emily:
Yeah, forgiveness is the course’s central teaching. So it’s here to teach us how to forgive one another. The course came to offer a better way, forgiveness, unconditional forgiveness is the better way. That is a truly radical thing to say, because whenever you say unconditional forgiveness, someone will insert the most horrific story and then say, you want me to forgive that? And the answer from a course perspective is yes, and here’s why. Forgiveness is the central teaching of the course because what the course is leading us to do is to move from body identification to spirit identification. So in other words, we’re moving from seeing what our physical eyes tell us is true about this other person, which includes what their body did, to who they really are as God created them. And when we can see the truth of who they are, that’s the basis on which we forgive. So in that state, as God created them, they are innocent. And what we’re doing is we’re saying, again, pass the body, pass the misdeeds to their truth. Now, that’s an incredibly difficult thing for us to do here. We think that it is so painful to overlook the actions of other people. But what the Course would tell you is that the real pain is holding on to that. that the real pain is what carrying that in our mind and in our body causes us to think and do ourselves. And so from a course perspective, the real work, the real pain rather is not forgiving, but holding on to all of that unforgiveness.

Guy:
Yeah, that’s big. It’s the work of a lifetime. It really is. It’s what came to mind, because I’ve had a couple of podcasts where I even questioned, wow, if I was in that position, could I truly forgive? A dear friend of mine, Don DeMond, he came on the podcast. His wife or his fiancee, they were about to get married, was shot by a Minnesota police officer. And because he’d been, I think he was three months on the force, and out of sheer panic, he leant over and shot her dead. And it was on the media, it was this huge, huge shitstorm of events that followed as well. And he wrote, and he said he wrote a letter of forgiveness, and then he showed it to a friend, and she read it and said, well, are you really forgiven? That’s actually more like a shit sandwich. There’s a bit of forgiveness, but then you’re holding on, and there’s a bit more forgiveness here, you know? And this was many years later, after he was convicted. And he went and reflected upon it all, and he’s like, you know, you’re absolutely right. And he rewrote the letter, and he fully forgave him. And from that, he was able to move on, you know, and let go. And I think of those possibilities and those representations of people in life. And that’s where I draw my strengths from when I think of different people that have been in different circumstances and go, wow, some of the things I get frustrated over are so insignificant. Let it go. I know.

Emily:
Right? I know we’re in the middle right now at the circle of a 28-day forgiveness challenge. And so we’ve got this whole community that have brought a person into the challenge that you’re supposed to forget. And some of these stories, I mean, they’re just heartbreaking. This is a heartbreaking world. And we have so many opportunities to be hurt and wounded here. And then you also see some incredibly beautiful knee-buckling stories of forgiveness. And one key to it, I mean there’s all kinds of keys to it, but one key to forgiveness in this world is You know, I think about the civil rights movement here in the United States where a core tenant of nonviolence was recognizing how wounded the other person is to be violent. And so that’s not a course teaching, that’s from the civil rights movement, but it’s always really stuck with me that if you can see the other person as a victim too, then you realize, okay, whatever it is that they have done has come from an incredibly wounded place in them, and that’s not the truth of who they really are. And if we cannot get to a world where we can override violence with love, then all we are going to have is a world where we just hit each other back, and the winner is whoever hit harder. And that is unsustainable. That’s the world we’re living in right now. And so for you, Marianne Williamson once said that if you think love in a world of violence is naive, then think about what’s going to happen if we continue on the track that we’re on right now. and you think that’s going to solve it, that’s naive. Love is the only thing that is going to win in the end. And so we can wrestle with whether or not we want to forgive or not, but at the end of the day, forgiveness is the only thing that heals. There is a redemptive power in love. And until we start to redeem people with our love, we’re just going to be into more of the same.

Guy:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I was so beautifully said. Are you the future of humanity? Go big for a moment. Do you feel like we’re getting it, or do you feel like it’s getting worse, or do you feel like there’s… No.

Emily:
No, I don’t feel like we’re getting it. There’s a Helen Schuchman, the scribe of the course, she asked, why now? And the guidance that she got was humanity’s in an acute emergency, where we’re going backwards more than we’re going forwards. And so people are being called in to help. And I think that I take a lot of comfort in that, that people are being called in to help like you, like so many others. People who are light bearers, who are here to help bring wisdom to the world, to help us teach us. teach how to get along, bring the principles of love to a world that needs it. So I look around and I take heart when I see that, but also, I mean, look at what’s happening in the world, the war with Russia and Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, here in the States. I mean, we are staring down the barrel at a loss of our democracy. And so no, actually, I don’t think that the world is getting these principles, but I have faith that it will because as Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Love will win in the end, but there may be a long period of suffering in the meantime.

Guy:
LR. Yeah, it’s a hard one, isn’t it? But I just feel deep in my heart, because when I bring, we can hold 34 people in a retreat. And over five days, what we witness from complete strangers coming together to what’s possible by the end of it, it lights a fire in me that I can’t even describe. And you think, this is possible. This is absolutely possible. And if people are willing to step through that door or step into an unknown and actually start to want to really know themselves and know what it means to be in unconditional love and to like all the things that you speak of, then I do hold hope. But then when I look outside of that as well, you kind of go, whoa, it’s a big job.

Emily:
Yeah, and it’s going to take the work of people who understand how to heal the heart. Yeah, Marianne Williamson said, if you know how to heal one heart, you know how to heal the world. And I think that’s true. And spirituality is the work of healing hearts. And we need to, and this is sort of my appeal to the spiritual community, to make spirituality about that work of healing. to make spirituality about healing minds, healing hearts, forgiving, repair. Because spirituality can’t just be about what’s going on in our mind, the shifts in our perception, what’s going on on my meditation mat, and my connection with God. It has to be if we’re going to change the trajectory of this place for everyone, it has to be about healing and repair.

Guy:
Totally.

Emily:
And that comes through love.

Guy:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s what my dear friend said, Dawn, when I spoke about forgiveness. You can’t heal in a vacuum. And I feel that’s so true. So true. So I got one last question around the Course in Miracles, and I’m just curious as well. How is it laid out? So is it like you have to read a task a day and then apply it, or is it weekly? How does it work?

Emily:
So the course has three volumes. There’s a text, which is the foundation, and it’s the largest volume, and there’s a workbook for students, and then there’s a manual for teachers. And at the Circle, we have programs that walk you through everything on a reading schedule, so you can get through the text in a year. The workbook is 365 lessons, so it’s designed to be a one-year process, and then the manual is And you can get through that actually in a few days, it’s very short. But if you, the way that you practice the course is, at least as we teach it, is you wake up, again, you do your meditation, you do your reading. If you’re in the workbook, for example, you would read that lesson for the day, and then you would practice, you have a practice line, and you would practice that throughout the day. And there’s all kinds of different lessons, practice instructions in the workbook, and it tells you what to do. But the whole point of it is to train your mind to undo the perceptions of the ego and fill your mind with that love so that you can extend that love in the world. And just very quickly, I know we have to go, but miracles in the Course are defined as expressions of love that have a healing effect on another person, and that healing in turn heals you. And so what we’re doing in A Course in Miracles is we’re learning how to express love to other people so that we can heal them and heal ourselves. And that’s what you’re doing every day is learning how to undo those old patterns of egoic thinking and infuse yourself with love.

Guy:
Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, that was going to be my question. How would you define a miracle then? But yeah, beautiful. So what does your morning routine look like these days, Emily? Just out of curiosity.

Emily:
It depends. When I’m with my husband, Robert Perry, he’s been a course student for 40 years. And so when I’m with him, I’m a lot more disciplined than I am when I’m by myself. He gets up and he’ll, you know, the course says as soon as you can after waking, you know, do your meditation. And so he’ll get up. do the meditation, and then we’ll do our reading, and then we’ll do our practice throughout the day. And we set 15-minute alarms. People find that to be a little extreme. So we’ll have a practice. So here’s a sticky. So I have a sticky. This one says, I look out from the perception of my holiness and perceive the holiness of others. And so every 15 minutes, the alarm will go off and we will silently, for 30 seconds or something, repeat that to ourselves. And then by the end of the day, and particularly the end of a few years of this, you really start to embed this in your thinking and in your psyche. And that’s the work that you need, but that’s what we do. Yeah, amazing. And then in the evening, you’re supposed to have an evening quiet time. It’s like your meditation time in the evening, like 10 minutes, but we always fall asleep.

Guy:
Where do you see yourself going with all this? Are you just kind of day by day now and just really embracing the moment?

Emily:
Oh, no, no. I mean, I’m definitely into embracing the moment, but I really feel like I’m here, we’re here, and the circle’s here to ground a tradition of A Course in Miracles in the world so that it can become one of the world’s great spiritual traditions. I think that there’s so much in this path that the world needs, including a focus on love, focus on equality, focus on forgiveness, focus on eradicating the hate in our minds. This is a remedy for a very broken world. That’s not to say it’s the only remedy. I think spiritual truth is truth, right? There’s all kinds of paths that will lead you up the spiritual mountain, but I have a charge with this one. And so every day is devoted to helping this path get out in the world and into hearts. We call it paper to hearts. So going from the paper on which it was printed into the hearts for which it was intended.

Guy:
Yeah, incredible. Thank you. And last question for you, Emily. With everything we’ve covered today, what would you like to leave the listeners to ponder on?

Emily:
I think I’ve already said it. I would leave your listeners with an appeal to make a spiritual practice other-oriented so that we can It’s not just you who are healed, but you who heal. Because we know that love is what heals your mind. Okay, that’s amazing. And that’s what we’re doing here. But take it further and be a demonstration of those principles that heal so that you can in turn heal others. And that’s how we will save the world.

Guy:
Beautiful. I’ll make sure links are in the show notes, Emily, but where can we send people? What website?

Emily:
Sure, we have our general website at circleofa.org, but really where I would encourage your listeners to go is in our free community, and that’s community.circleofa.org. And when you’re in that space, you have access to all of our free events. We host a sacred silence gathering on Mondays. We have Sunday gatherings every other week and all kinds of free events. And we also have access to our premium Course Companions Programming in community.circleofa.org, where if you want help going through the course, we provide that as well.

Guy:
Amazing. Well, I’ll make sure both links are in the show notes for everyone, so they can come and check it out. Emily, I just want to say thank you so much. You’re truly a beautiful soul, and I love this podcast. It really, really, really resonated. Yeah, thank you for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate it.

Emily:
Thank you. It was an honor to talk to you, and thanks for all the great work that you’re doing, all the shows that you do on this podcast, the retreats that you run. You really are doing the light work as well.

Guy:
I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Emily. Cheers.