Your ego is not going to like this. But in order to be fully forgiving you're going to have to find a way to find everyone innocent, no matter what they seem to do.

This includes every degree of criminal behavior, every form of attack, all abuse and torture and sexual perversion, every single way that one person might seem to hurt another. Even if you see it, even if it is continuing, you STILL have to find a way to see innocence. God does not turn anyone away for any reason.

How are you going to do that? Society is definitely not going to support you in this. Most people across the world are so full of guilt they don't even know what innocence is. They see the whole world through a filter of guilt and darkness, which translates anything anyone does into a sin.

Being incapable of forgiving, most people will just react with fake horror at the first sign of anyone else's mistake, and will jump at the chance to scapegoat them. To hate and to blame, to condemn and accuse, to demand their punishment, even their death. This is very unforgiving.

If you are to see that an "evil criminal" is completely innocent, you're not going to be able to maintain your USE of them as a scapegoat. The only way you could really find them guilty is by finding yourself guilty, then trying to shovel that off onto them. And this is what most people are doing.

We have to become able to reognize that all insane behavior is just a mistaken state of mind, people acting on confusion and delusion, various forms of madness and dysfunction and unhealed wounds. And all of this calls for healing, not further harm.

The key is that when we witness someone seeming to make a horrendous mistake, we see it NOT as a sin, but as merely a mistake calling for love. And the only way to do that is to NOT enter into the game of projecting guit. You must not find them guilty of what they appear to be doing. No matter what it is they seem to do, even if it's what we'd call some horrendous murder.

Typically when someone does something wrong, all of society will jump on them in justified anger, point a finger, blame and hate, and want that person to be punished. This is not forgiveness and is part of those people's insanity. They are trying to take the opportunity to get rid of their own guilt and madness, by conveniently attaching it to someone else's mistake.

When you forgive enough, you can no longer side with the people that want to have a witch hunt. You can no longer accept that when someone does something to hurt another it's completely justified to be angry at them and want them to be punished. You can no longer tolerate and accept other people taking advantage of the situation to deal out some punishment that they think is deserved.

All punishing, all accusing, all hurting, all destroying, all anger, all attack, all guilt, has to stop. It can hardly be corrective to USE any of these as a response to someone that DOES any of these. To punish someone who is doing something wrong is a double punishment. To hate someone who is hating does absolutely NOTHING to improve the situation. It just adds insult to injury and is hipocritical.

The only proper response to anyone doing anything is to love, and to help them to return to love, through healing and help. Nothing else is sane. Nothing else is effective. There has to be rehabilitation, reintegration, therapy, healing, love, support, encouragement and a desire to have the person return to the community, welcomed with open-arms and loved.

In fact, if any one person is relegated to evil, deserving of punishment, or we decide they "should be guilty", we are not helping anything at all. We are just reinforcing ego and making it worse. Punishment is not education, it is the opposite, and has the opposite effect. It is not a deterrent, it just reinforces ego patterns.

Only forgiveness works. And in order to forgive, it must be seen as justified. And the only way it is justified is if YOU perceive that everyone DESERVES it, because you do not see or recognize or support guilt in them. And the only way to not support guilt in them is to not have any in yourself. Only the self-accused condemn. Only the innocent can be forgiving. And those who project guilt are more guilty than those they project it upon.

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in this view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin except a false idea about God's Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God."

"But first, lift up your eyes and look upon each other in innocence, born of COMPLETE forgiveness of each other's illusions, and through the eyes of faith, which see them not."

"And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt?"

"Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. It is the reflection of God's Love on earth. It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me to my home."

You have everything. God shared it with you.

But then the ego comes along and says, "you don't have that". It tells you, "you're lacking what God gave you. what he supposedly gave you is not HERE. so you'd better go look for it somewhere ELSE."

So then you start to SEEK. And this seeking is like running away from what God gave you. And what God gave you is inside you, so you're running away fromyourself.

As Jesus says, all forms of sickness are produced by seeking externally outside of yourself. What this means is, if you believe and assert that you do not already HAVE what God has given you, that's actually an ATTACK on your invulnerability. And that attack now means that you are attempting to believe that a) you are not as God created you (you are sick), b) you have lack and emptiness in you (death), and c) you will not find God by going within (separation).

Then you go off looking for... basically yourself, for God.... anywhere OTHER than where it is. The ego's made sure you believe its not in you, and you don't have it, and you are not yourself, and God is not in your mind, so now you look everywhere ELSE for it. You therefore are now looking "outside yourself", somewhere beyond your is-ness, to try to find what you think you lack.

And as you do this, you are compounding the belief that you are lacking, that you're empty, that God is not with you for some reason, that you don't have health, that you are less than whole, that you are diminished and void in some way. And all of those attack thoughts produce SICKNESS. They are like evil curses.

Then as you seek, looking everywhere but where you'll find God/Self, out in the world, or even in the body, you WILL NOT FIND IT. You've separated yourself from it, so now you are blind to it, and aware UNAWARE of its presence, so you literally do not see it. You will therefore keep hunting around in the dark, worried, afraid, desperate that you need to get this 'something' back, and yet you will not find it. The 'it' is not out there, beyond your Self. The 'it' as God is not separate from you, lost in some world somewhere.

So you will then "seek and not find". And you'll not find pretty hard. And especially if your believe in being lacking in some way is strong, e.g. unworthy, or imperfect, or flawed, or whatever, you will be compelled even more strongly to SEEK. And yet the harder you seek, where the 'it' is not, i.e. outside of you, the more you will fail to find it. And you'll grow really frustrated that you are coming up empty handed and being led on wild goosechases. But, if you're really steeped in this belief in how much you are lacking, you'll still have yet another attempt at finding it. You'll tell yourself you didn't look hard enough (because you're defective), and that can be a vicious circle.

So then you seek and fail and seek harder and fail harder and it gets really desperate and exasperating. You feel like you just can't find a solution. You go into panic. The ego has really got you in its grips. And the fact is, it's because you are looking for something you DID NOT EVEN REALLY LOSE in the first place, in a location that it does not exist. You need to QUESTION THE NEED TO SEEK, by questioning whether it is TRUE that you actually 'lack' in the way that you believe.

So what that then boils down to is, it's a matter of awareness. You have blocks to your awareness which hide from your awareness the presence of everything God already gave you. And if you had full awareness of everything God gave you, you would KNOW that you do not lack ANYTHING and that you have NO NEEDS. Thus no need to seek. The block to awareness is all the ways that the ego tells you, you are not ALREADY fully equipped, that you are not ALREADY complete and whole, that you are not ALREADY holy and perfect, or that you are not ALREADY WITH GOD.

Yes, you are already with God. You just have a block to awareness covering it up.

So we need to stop seeking. After all, people who find, stop seeking, right? You might think that means you have to seek first in order to find second? Well, what if you just find? What if you just accept that you are already in a state of having found yourself, and found God, and that you are in the presence of what you THOUGHT you were lacking? What if you question all of the 'lacking' belief? What if you undo all of the 'don't deserve it' and all of the 'not perfect enough' and all of the 'I'm not God's beloved child'? What will be REVEALED?

The truth!

The truth will set you free, or rather, you will be set free INTO the truth. The truth is, God already loves you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, you are not lacking at all, you are worthy of unconditional love, you are totally 100% acceptable, you are perfectly innocent and HOLY, and you have absolutely NO REASON to be afraid. All fear stems from a sense of separation from God, i.e. something's gone wrong and now you have to seek. Stop it. No fear is needed, only celebration, that "I was lost and now I'm found". Cus when you're a seeker, you're a loser. When you stop seeking, you win, because then the ego loses.

"Be still and know that I am God." See.

I've been trying to find away to describe forgiveness in a way that is fully encompassing. I'm getting closer.

First of all we were in heaven and everything was, and still is, perfect and whole and innocent and beautiful and immortal.

Then we did the separation idea which is an attempt to dream that you are exiled from heaven and outside of God, in a mortal realm of death and suffering.

God created the Holy Spirit to answer this insane world and provide a template/example of how to live and see in such a way that a) hell is forgiven and overlooked and not believed in, and b) the way to heaven is opened up.

ACIM refers to "the real world" as something you reach or see just prior to heaven. It also refers to "the forgiven world", the world you made but seen from a different perspective.

The question is, how do you move from false perception to true perception, and what is the nature of this true perception? How do you look at hell and not regard it as hell?

The really mind-bending part I think is in trying to understand how you can be in this hellish cruel world and not regard it as real. Or the question of, how do you love something which is driven toward attack and sin and death.

I think what we have to realize is, Jesus is trying to get us to accept ONLY and align with, the nature of heaven. He wants us to be heaven-like. This entails several aspects:

1) "Be vigilant only for the Kingdom", meaning to put your full attention on accepting it as the ONLY truth and not believing anything else.

2) "I am under no laws but God's", meaning you recognize that you operate within and from God and by His laws, completely ignoring the laws of spacetime.

3) "Teach only love for that is what you are", meaning you are being the way you would be in heaven, loving and giving and joyful and appreciative.

4) "I am still as God created me", meaning you recognize your identity as Christ which is IN heaven, and live out from that Christ nature, expressing Christ at all times.

5) "The power to work miracles belongs to you" and "To recognize that all power is of God is to gain all power", meaning that you are plugged into Spirit and the Holy Spirit is mechanizing miracles through you, you are effortlessly able to break the laws of the world and "there is nothing my holiness cannot do."

6) "Only the truth is true and nothing else is true", meaning we believe and accept fully only God's truth and ways, and completely reject and deny and see as false anything that is against this truth. Which includes all aspects of the false world of hell.

The list really goes on, because the course says a lot about this. But I think overall if we focus on trying to "be heaven like" while in this world, accepting only God's truth as true, bringing Heaven's light and love into this world to heal, being "in it but not of this world", we will achieve "the real world".

The real world is a reflection of heaven, aligned with heaven, symbolizing heaven. It is a state of mind. And that state of mind is very close to being heavenly. So we need to get our minds into a heaven-like state as much as possible in dreaming.

As we do this, as we become "the light of the world", as we express miracles from God, as we extend God's love here and be as God created us, identified with spirit not body, and are essentially acting from beyond the laws of spacetime, our attitude towards hell and cruelty will automatically take on its "new perspective".

The true perception we are steering toward and HOW it looks and WHAT it sees are really determined by you "embedding" yourself in heaven. Being true to God's truth. Being aligned with God's will. Being an extender of God's love. Being a doer of God's will. etc... Like, if you might imagine, an angel of light who has briefly stepped into this dimension, retaining all its heavenly brightness and power, not of this world but acting in it temporarily.

It's by recognizing that the real world is a reflection of heaven, and that therefore true perception is aligned with knowledge, that we can see "what kind of seeing" we need to be having, "what kind of attitude" we need to be having about the world.

When we are coming from love and light and truth we just WILL see the world in a forgiving way. What seemed to be dark and cruel and twisted, will be loved and shone away. What seemed to be attack and threat and danger, will be rendered harmless. It's hard to imagine HOW that can be possible or what that "looks like", but it is automatically taken care of when your mind is approaching oneness with God.

We are to be heaven's representatives here in this realm. We are to be teachers of God who teach (give, extend, express, symbolize) God here in this realm. We are to demonstrate that we are entirely driven by, orchestrated by, willing with, in unison with, on the side of, accepting of, God and his mighty companions.

And we are to live as though we are in heaven already, perfect already, immortal already, while having these bodies, to symbolize and represent innocence, harmlessness and an eternal life to those who are tired of the drudgery the world has to offer.

Jesus asks of us to completely forget A Course in Miracles, forget the entire world, forget the body, and come to God with empty hands.

In this, Jesus isn't asking us to stay in our body, thinking we are a body, studying ACIM fervently and going about our special little lives on planet Earth.

He is asking us to become fully aware that we are NOT a body whatsoever, that we do not need one to exist, that the world the body inhabits is just as much an illusion as the body itself, and that we are FREE of this crap.

Jesus has demonstrated that the body is not real. He has demonstrated that it can be disappeared along with all sickness and all death. This is what he's asking us to do as well. Not just to sort of hangout in an in-between state of being more special or staying in the body and seeing the world sparkle.

There is no world. It is an illusion. It must disappear when recognized correctly for what it is. And so must your body.

The body is the hero of the dream. It is designed as a device to LIMIT and SEPARATE mind from itself. It is meant to obscure the omnipresence of God and make it seem like everything is unlike everything else (ie there is no God).

As you stay in the body, believing it is real, and not fully transcending it, you are continuing the belief that God does not really exist.

The world is not left by death but by truth. And truth means the awareness that the body and its world are just a DREAM, not reality.

God has a "place" for us, an experience of total oneness, "heaven" if you will, which is the only true reality. And bodies have nothing to do with it.

If you're angry at someone, test to see if it's possible that you are angry at them at the same time as loving yourself. Can you actually feel both self-love (genuine) and anger at the same time?

You cannot.

The reason you cannot is because what you do to others, you do to yourself.

While you're being angry towards the other person, YOU are suffering from that anger as well. You might be feeling righteous or justified, but you're not feeling love. And then you might say, well, when I'm not angry at this person for a short while, I can go back to loving ME because I'm innocent, but they're not. And then you flip-flop back and forth. And you think that you love yourself but the unhealed grievance STAYS with you and lurks in the background, undermining your own self-love.

The ego's trick is to make you believe you can have an attitude about someone else that does not apply to you. That there is a separation between the two of you, and therefore they can be wrong while you are right, or your anger is about them and not about yourself. Mistake.

You can't love yourself fully if you don't love others, and vice versa. You can't pick and choose. Either you share love for the benefit of everyone or you are attacking everyone, and in both cases that includes you.

So try it next time you're mad at someone or upset by someone... see if you can feel complete self-love at the same time. You won't be able to, because you're being unloving to yourself.

If it were true that we are all separate, then you would have to have the ability to love and hate at the same time. That is clearly impossible to any rational person.

We are all one.

There is a subtle form of ego projection which may go unnoticed.

Sometimes other people are arguing or upset. It may not necessarily have anything to do with you and you might not be actively a part of the argument.

But the ego in you can start to experience a kind of "delight" that others are suffering or in conflict. It's almost like saying, I don't even need to project sin to make others guilty because they're doing a great job of being guilty on their own.

The ego then kind of sits back in glee, in a kind of sick way, excited that someone else is receiving the punishment.

I've seen this rise up in myself on occasion when other people are having arguments in front of me. The ego becomes a kind of spectator, feeding off the situation by "enjoying" the conflict.

The ego is sadistic, and false beliefs always lean toward welcoming suffering. The ego loves to suffer, to be both victim and victimizer. So when both external parties are victimizing and being victims of each other, the ego is having a field day.

I have to watch this in myself and notice it. When I notice it, it seems to collapse and disappear immediately if I recognize that this is me being ego. Just because I don't seem to be involved doesn't mean my ego stays quiet. It gets involved passively.

This is also the source of people gossiping about each other or backstabbing or creating drama indirectly about the behaviors of others. Using them as virtual scapegoats. Taking advantage of the opportunity to be "right" about others being "wrong" because of how other people dug their own grave.

Check this out.

"IMMORTALITY is HIS Will for His Son, and His Son’s will for HIMSELF. Yet God’s Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM ."

See that?

God's Son CANNOT will death for himself.

That means, it is IMPOSSIBLE to die. You can't do it.

You can PRETEND TO. You can make an illusion as if it is happening even. You can make an image of a body laying on the ground lifeless.

But that is not death.

It's fake.

It's not who you are.

You cannot die.

If you could accept that you cannot die and that you are immortal, you would actually drop ALL attempts to prove otherwise, which accounts for the entire content of the ego and all forms of sickness and suffering. This would all vanish if you would accept you are immortal, and that any effort NOT to be immortal is utterly futile.

Suicide is pointless. If you can get this idea into your mind, that you have eternal life, and that therefore suicide will not end your life, and you will keep on going, and then you will have to come back to another lifetime to keep learning that you cannot die, then you would not commit suicide. It is completely pointless and futile because it DOES NOT WORK.

All we need to do is accept that we are still as God created us, we are still immortal, death is IMPOSSIBLE, and there is nothing we can do to change God's will.

Think about that for a moment.

There is absolutely nothing you can do to change God's will. Can you feel the surrender in that? You might as well just accept it and drop everything else, if you are seeing sense.

The whole thought system of ego and being separate from God, is rooted in the idea of murder. This might not be apparent, and you might not think that many of the things you do are murderous. We reserve that term for when a body kills a body for example.

But in the course, "murderousness" is any form of inequality. It's a denial of the Golden Rule, the law of God. In truth what we do to another we do to ourselves, because we are one. But to the ego there is a breakdown in cause and effect, and between self and other. And this gives rise to what seems like a possibility that you can attack (cause) without being attacked (effect). Or that what you do to your brother you do not do to yourself - that what is true of him is not true of you.

This is a murderous idea because it now means that you can attack and escape the consequences. It means you can assign guilt to someone else and not yourself. That someone else can be hurt without you being hurt. And this is the very definition of murder.

Make no mistake also that the ego heavily believes in this, and as a result heavily believes that YOU are murderous, and that you are extremely guilty for having done so. Murderousness is the idea of sin. The ego believes that you have literally murdered God and his son. And as a result, it claims that you should be extremely guilty. This is the core of its belief.

The truth is that it is impossible to murder anything real, the Golden Rule cannot be violated, what you do to another you still do to yourself, you cannot escape consequences, and you have NOT murdered anyone or anything in reality. Therefore you are NOT guilty.

But you're going to find that as you explore this and attempt to undo this belief in your murderous nature, which the ego does heavily believe, the ego is going to put up quite a fight, and its going to keep insisting that you're a very guilty person. Deep down you do believe this, and it's a belief that it highly mistaken and will have to be systematically dismantled with the Holy Spirit.

The ego's desire to kill YOU off, is its belief that YOU have killed yourself off. And since you are the son of God, it believes that you not only are against yourself but that you want yourself to die. This murderousness is a suicidal belief of self attack. But if you cannot be killed, because you are immortal, then you also cannot be guilty, and definitely do not deserve to die.

What we are undoing through forgiveness is a seemingly murderous intention, which claims you have committed the ultimate sin, and therefore at completely guilty and worthy of death. The ego will hold this up in your face and wave it in front of you like it's true, because it believes it is real and has happened. But your job is to NOT believe this, because it can't possibly be true in God's reality.

The ego belief in you IS murderous and wants the total destruction and death of God and his sonship. And it would try to persuade you that YOU are itself, and thus are just as guilty. But you are NOT a murderer, you are innocent and holy. Your belief that you are guilty is mistaken. You are not guilty. You have not sinned. And God still welcomes you with open arms.

"What is NOT love IS murder. What is not loving MUST be an attack. EVERY illusion is an assault on truth. And every one does violence to the IDEA of love, because it SEEMS to be of equal truth. What can be EQUAL to the truth, yet different? Murder and love are incompatible."

"The darkest of your hidden cornerstones holds your belief in guilt from your own awareness. For in that dark and secret place is the realization that you have betrayed God's Son, by condemning him to death. You do not even SUSPECT that this murderous but insane idea lies hidden there. For the ego's destructive urge is so intense, that nothing short of the crucifixion of God's Son can ultimately satisfy it."

"Of this you dream. And, UNDERNEATH this dream, is yet another, in which YOU become the murderer, the secret enemy, the scavenger and the destroyer of the brother and the world you fear alike. Here is the CAUSE of suffering, the space BETWEEN your dreams and your reality. The little gap you do not even see, the birthplace of illusions and of fear, the time of terror and of ancient hate, the instant of disaster; -- all are here. Here is the CAUSE of unreality. And it is here that it will be undone."

"Now, for an instant, is a murderer perceived within you, eager for your death, intent on plotting punishment for you until the time when it can kill at last. Yet in this instant is the time as well in which salvation comes. For fear of God has disappeared. And you can call on Him to save you from illusions in His Love, calling Him Father and yourself His Son."

"A murderer IS frightened, and those who kill FEAR death."

"How can a battle be perceived as nothingness, when you ENGAGE in it? How can the truth of miracles be RECOGNIZED, if murder is your choice? When the temptation to attack rises to make your mind darkened and murderous, remember you CAN see the battle from above."

It is important for you to claim the atonement for yourself, because you are an extender of God's love.

If there is a block in your awareness, whereby you are not willing to receive love for yourself, love is not going to be able to flow through you to other people.

Love comes from God, goes through you, and extends outward to others.

If you put up a roadblock in your mind where you are not willing to receive love yourself, you will be incapable of allowing that love to fully flow through you to others.

You only will see God in everything you see when God is in your mind, and God has to be in your mind FIRST. The doors have to be open for the light to shine through.

You might think it is important to learn to love others as much as possible. I thought this was what I was supposed to do, becoming very loving and try to love all the time. But Holy Spirit corrected me on this.

He said, "you must love yourself first."

If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love others. The amount of love you can give entirely depends on how much love you have. If you are empty of love, you can try to fake it, to sacrifice, and to strain to try to love others, but you will hit walls and limitations.

There will be ways in which you also believe that other people are not lovable, they are just too irritating or annoying or upsetting, or they make bad choices or attack you or whatever. You will think that it is because of them that you cannot love them, or that you can only love them conditionally some of the time.

When pushed to your limits you will find out that in fact the thing stopping you from being able to love this monstrous enemy is your own inability to love any more than you already do. And the reason you can't do that is because you're hitting the limit of how much you love yourself.

So then it becomes a matter of, it's not really other people that you can't love another ounce, it's yourself. You yourself are hitting the limits of how loving you can be, because there is something about your own self that you do not love. There is a blockage in you, an unwillingness to let that much love be present in you.

So now it's simply impossible for you to love other people that much extra without FIRST addressing what it is about your own self that seems unlovable. You have to make room for love in yourself before you can love others that much more.

It seems ideal and appealing to be very loving to others as much as possible but you simply will not be able to, or willing to, and you will stop short of being able to find that much love and compassion in you, simply because you yourself are not willing to let YOU be loved that much.

The challenge then is learning to let yourself be loved, to become open to love and receive love for yourself. This means undoing false ego beliefs and self attack, so that you can come to believe the truth is true and be actually WILLING to accept the truth - your innocence - your lovability. You must therefore accept Atonement FOR YOURSELF, SO THAT you can access and receive love, be open to love coming to you, open to it flowing through you, and thus be able to offer it to others.

When you do this, when you take that sole responsibility of accepting atonement for yourself, it means you are now willing to receive love and recognize that you CAN be loved and are loved. This willingness to acknowledge the worthiness of love within yourself GIVES YOU the ability to see love and worthiness in others, you will believe they deserve that love also, and then you will give it to them. This is the START of your ability to be MIRACULOUS, because miracles are always expressions of love.

You must receive the gift of love first in order to give it. You must receive the miracle for yourself first in order to give it. You must heal yourself before you can heal others. And you must forgive yourself before you can extend forgiveness to others. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. It is the privilege of the healed to heal. It is the privilege of those who have accepted miraculous truth for themselves to perform miracles to help others be freed from their illusions of suffering.

Accepting the Atonement for yourself, as your sole responsibility, should never be seen as meaning that other people are SEPARATE from you or that they are excluded from your atonement. Once you have accepted atonement for yourself you ARE accepting it on behalf of everyone else, and it WILL result in you becoming loving towards others and able to perform miracles for them.

Many people use this "sole responsibility" as an argument for some kind of "private awakening", which excludes everyone else and it used to explain why you would not then perform and miracles. Its meaning is totally the opposite. To accept the atonement is to accept oneness, which applies to YOU AND EVERYONE because it makes you an extender of love. You must take responsibility for accepting it for yourself, SO THAT you enter into a state of SHARING, and are then able to EXTEND THE ATONEMENT to other people in the form of miracles. The atonement justifies being a miracle worker.

We are constantly choosing, and in that choice are most often choosing to pretend that we have no choice.

That's the same thing as choosing to pretend that we have no power and that things are happening against our will.

When we are disempowered, we then tend to seek to fight against oppressors, rise up against enemies, and struggle with life. We think we're justified in doing so and that by doing so we are being powerful.

But that is not empowerment. That's weakness. War is always about weakness not power. There is no strength in conflict. War is just a "show" of strength that looks like strength but is actually vulnerability. We're just making the disempowerment more real, and keeping us stuck.

You actually have the real power to DIRECTLY affect outcomes, not that you need to manipulate them indirectly or wait for someone else to make the changes.

We have to learn to stop pretending that we do not have power. We need to stop make-believing that someone took it from us or that we have none. We just keep giving it away, over and over again. We keep disowning ourselves and hiding under a rock.

The more that we displace our own power onto other people and make them responsible for our lives, the more we wait for them and demand that they be the ones to change so that they will 'make our lives better' for us. And in that position we will be terrified and vulnerable, believing we have no power of our own to do anything.

You can't hide your power and feel powerful. You can't put responsibility for your life into other people's hands and experience strength or freedom. If you want other people to be responsible for your life, there's another word for that: imprisonment.