Category: Observations

Forgiveness According to A Course in Miracles

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Course in Miracles, Observations

Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot on forgiveness—not the dramatic, cinematic kind that requires a public confession or a sweeping, transformative act—but the quiet, often unseen practice that happens in the small, daily choices of how we engage with the world. A Course in Miracles provides a particularly compelling framework for this kind of forgiveness, one that gently redefines our usual understanding of what it means to forgive and, perhaps more radically, who it is we are forgiving.

In my early days of studying the Course, I found myself repeatedly stalled by the language. The texts are often dense, abstract, and insistently paradoxical: “Nothing real can be threatened,” it says, and yet the world continues to threaten everything we cherish. The first time I read this, I thought, ‘Well, that’s comforting… but how does it help me with my emails and my deadlines?’ Yet, with ongoing study, what initially seemed theoretical began to resonate in everyday life. Forgiveness in the Course is less about condoning behaviour or minimising harm than about recognising the illusory nature of grievance itself—a shift in perception that allows the mind to release the burden it carries.

One of the passages that has stayed with me most is from the Workbook (Lesson 122): “Forgiveness offers everything I want.” It is easy to skim over this but in practice, it prompts a radical reorientation. When I notice irritation bubbling up in a meeting, or resentment at a friend’s perceived slight, I try, however imperfectly, to pause and ask: What is my mind holding onto here, and what might I gain if I released it? Sometimes the answer is a subtle lightening of mood; other times, it is simply recognising that my insistence on being right costs me more than the imagined offence ever could.

The Course aligns in intriguing ways with contemporary work on attachment and interpersonal dynamics. Researchers like Daniel Siegel have shown that holding onto anger or hurt is, at its core, a way of maintaining control over a relational landscape. Forgiveness, in the sense that the Course uses it, disrupts this dynamic not by changing the other person but by changing our relationship to the story we tell ourselves about them. It is a deeply relational act, even if it does not require confrontation or restitution. In this sense, the Course and attachment theory converge: both recognise that true freedom often arises when we disentangle ourselves from patterns of reactivity and take responsibility for our own experience of the world.

Forgiveness is to give-for. To forgive is not just to cancel a debt or erase an injury; it is to create a space where something else can appear. Forgiveness is generative precisely because it involves taking away what we cling to. In the act of giving-for, we let go of what we might otherwise hold on to—resentment, grievance, the illusion of control—and in doing so, we make room.

That space does not stay empty for long. The psyche, like nature, dislikes a vacuum. When we forgive, we carve out a space where something new can take root. Often it is peace, sometimes clarity, sometimes the possibility of a different kind of relationship. The point is not to decide in advance what will fill the space, but to trust that it will be filled by something that loosens the grip of the past and guides us towards a future not already shaped by hurt.

In this way, forgiveness is less about the other person and more about the conditions we create within ourselves. By making space, we stop defining ourselves through the wound. The pull of the old story weakens, and the self is free to reconfigure. To forgive is not to condone, nor is it to forget—it is to make room for the future.

The risk, of course, is that we may hesitate, fearing that if we release what has anchored us, we will be left unmoored. Yet the paradox of forgiveness is that what feels like a loss is in fact a preparation. To give–for is to trust in the fertility of the void. In my own practice, I have noticed that forgiveness tends to arise more naturally when it is paired with compassion. 

Thích Nhất Hạnh’s writings on “loving-kindness” are a fantastic complement to the Course’s metaphysics. Both invite us to hold ourselves and others gently, to acknowledge imperfection without judgment, and to see beyond the immediate form of conflict. 

Forgiveness, then, is not a one-off act but a series of small, attentive gestures: a reconsideration of a conversation that went wrong, a letting go of imagined slights, or even a moment of patience with one’s own internal critic. It is worth noting that the Course’s approach to forgiveness is not sentimental. It does not ask us to sweep abuse under the rug or to equate forgiveness with naive tolerance. Instead, it challenges the mind to see differently: to recognise that the story of injury, while compelling, is not the ultimate reality. In the Course, forgiveness is not about giving others what they do not deserve, but is about giving ourselves release from the prison of resentment. In this, there is both liberation and clarity: we are freed to act from a space of choice rather than a feeling of obligation, from love rather than fear.

Practically speaking, there are several ways to bring the Course’s teaching on forgiveness into daily life. One approach is to keep a small journal of resentments and imagined grievances, and then, as a reflective exercise, attempt to see the situation through the lens of the Course: what part of my mind is holding onto this, and what might I perceive differently if I allowed forgiveness to operate? Another method, particularly helpful when emotions are strong, is to practice brief meditative pauses—one or two minutes—where you consciously soften your stance and breathe into a sense of release. Over time, these small interventions accumulate, subtly shifting patterns of thought and feeling.

In everyday life, I often find that these practices manifest in unexpected ways. A tense exchange with a colleague might resolve itself not through debate but through a quiet internal decision to release judgment. A moment of impatience with family can be softened simply by noticing the story I am telling myself and choosing to let it go. These are not grand miracles but small, lived interventions—the kind that quietly build into a different way of being. 

If you are curious to explore forgiveness in the context of the Course in a communal, reflective setting, I warmly invite you to my weekly Course in Miracles study group. We focus on both the theoretical principles and their practical applications, supporting one another in integrating the Course into our daily lives. It is a space where questions are welcomed, experiences are shared, and the abstract becomes tangible within real, lived contexts.

Forgiveness, ultimately, is a practice rather than a verdict. The Course reminds us that what we release in our minds, we release in our lives: the minor grievances, the lingering judgments, the habitual narratives that tether us to fear. In making room for forgiveness, we create space for freedom, clarity, and, perhaps most quietly, a gentler way of moving through the world.

Find your Calm this Labor Day – Just £11.99 This Weekend Only

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Labor Day is about more than just a long weekend. It’s a moment to pause, step back, and reconnect with what matters most. What better time to begin a practice that reduces stress, boosts focus, and helps you feel more present in your life?

That’s precisely what my course Integrative Meditation | Level 1 is designed to do. And for this weekend only, you can enrol for just £11.99 (regularly £14.99).

👉 Click here to claim the Labor Day offer before it ends

Why This Course?

Most meditation programs stop at relaxation. Integrative Meditation goes deeper. Drawing from Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), neuroscience, positive psychology, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), journaling, and breathwork, this 4-week programme gives you a science-backed framework to rewire your brain and build resilience for the long term.

Here’s what you’ll gain:

  • Less stress & anxiety: Learn practical tools to calm your mind and regulate your body’s stress response.
  • Freedom from negative thinking: Break the cycle of self-doubt and transform limiting beliefs into self-compassion.
  • Sharper focus & productivity: Train your attention, reduce distractions, and get more done with clarity.
  • Stronger emotional resilience: Quiet the critical inner voice and bounce back from setbacks with greater ease.
  • A deeper sense of self: Go beyond labels and roles to connect with your authentic purpose and values.

And unlike one-off guided meditations, this course helps you establish a lasting practice—through short knowledge lectures, guided meditations, and reflective journaling you can fit into just 30 minutes a day.

Why Now?

Because the habits you start today will shape your tomorrow. With the long weekend ahead, you can finally give yourself the space to begin a meditation practice that sticks.

For just £11.99 this Labor Day weekend, you’ll get:

  • 6+ hours of on-demand video
  • 42 guided lessons across 4 weeks
  • 9 downloadable resources & 1 article
  • Lifetime access on all devices
  • Certificate of completion

Normally £14.99, this offer is only available until Monday night.

Ready to Begin?

Click below to start Integrative Meditation Level 1 for just £11.99 and begin rewiring your mind for peace, focus, and resilience.

👉 Claim your spot before the sale ends

This Labor Day, give yourself the gift of calm.

Literary Walks: How Reading Cities Shapes the Way We Live in Them

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

I notice how literature lingers in the pavements in London. I’ve found this more and more the longer I’ve lived here. After all, ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life’, as Samuel Johnson wrote. Even on the most ordinary days, when I’m simply walking to the shops or having a coffee, a remembered passage from Woolf or Dickens reshapes the atmosphere, giving a quiet strangeness to what otherwise might seem familiar. Literary walks don’t need to be formal, nor do they require a tour group—although there is a place for those. Instead, they are an everyday practice of letting what we’ve read colour what we see, and in turn allowing the city to read us back.

Cities are always already read, even before we open a book about them. Our streets teem with signs and symbols: shopfront typography, graffiti tags, the peculiar poetics of street names, layering like muddy sediment the history of an ancient city, each one carrying some buried narrative. Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, reminds us that everyday signs are never innocent, but instead they come loaded with cultural meaning. Michel de Certeau goes further, describing walking itself as a kind of writing: each step a form of mark-making, each turn a marginal note. Perhaps this is why walking has become one of my most reliable contemplative practices; I can never quite shake the sense that London is, in spite of its sublime history, an unfinished text, and that my role as a walker is not only to read but to annotate.

Reading literature set in a city makes us feel less like visitors and more like participants. When I first read Mrs Dalloway, I hadn’t spent much time in London, but the rhythm of Woolf’s sentences gave me an immediate familiarity with the city. Later, when I actually walked those spaces and traced Clarissa’s journey on foot with my students the novel gave me entry points into belonging to a city that didn’t seem materially my own. Literature offers a way of settling without appropriation: it lets us walk streets we may never ‘own’ or even afford to live on, but with a kind of kinship. For me, reading the urban canon—Joyce’s Ulysses for Dublin, Smith’s NW for Willesden—has softened the edges of new places, helping me to live in them with curiosity rather than defensiveness.

Walking with a book’s shadow creates a double vision: the city as it is, and the city as it is imagined. Every time I find myself near Holborn, I see Dickens’s London superimposed on the glassy facades of insurance firms; the ghosts of debtors’ prisons and fog-bound alleys live on in the shadow of a Costa or Pret. And I can’t help but notice how nearly every pub in the vicinity has a plaque reporting that Dickens used to drink there and recounting a famous 17th-century stabbing that took place there. To walk with these texts is to carry a palimpsest in mind, where past and present are layered, sometimes clashing, sometimes harmonising. In my own recent walks, especially since returning to more teaching this year after six years in leadership, I’ve been acutely aware of this doubling. The university campus is also both a physical environment and a palimpsest of earlier student generations—I grow older, but my students, disconcertingly, stay the same age every year. Literature trains us to notice these overlays, and walking keeps the lesson alive.

Literary walking is not only about cities, it is also about the walker. What we bring to the page and to the street matters as much as what the author provides. Some days my walks are brisk and pragmatic; on others, they slow into reverie. I notice how my mood shapes the city I ‘read’, whether the buildings feel inviting or alienating, whether the metaphors I attach are hopeful or heavy. Theorists of psychogeography often emphasise dérive—the unplanned journey or drift—as a mode of breaking free from capitalist rationalisation of space. Yet for me, walking with literature offers a slightly different promise: not only resistance, but companionship. A door knocker shaped like a lion’s head, a tree whose branches look suddenly archetypal, a narrow side alley that seems like it should have its own subplot. Reading tunes our attention and primes us to see texture where before there was only function. 

There is also a social dimension to literary walking. Books are companions, but so too are the people we share them with. When I’ve brought novels into reading groups or teaching seminars, I’ve been struck by how each reader brings a different walk through the same text. These conversations remind me that the city is never read alone—it is always interpreted collectively, shaped by a multiplicity of histories. I think of my own upcoming groups—the Living a Course a Course in Miracles study group or the weekly Creative Flow Sessions that are beginning this autumn—as spaces where such collective interpretations of experience can flourish, even if not always tethered to literal walking.

In many ways, literary walking is about staying with a place rather than consuming it. When I moved to Hong Kong, I was initially so overcome by the immensity of it that I bought a fancy camera to help me train my vision on the particulars; when I visit Stockholm, my favourite city in the world after London, I find a space that is, inversely, more human-scale. London is a capital somewhere in between, neither entirely comforting to the human spirit or form, nor entirely forbidding. One never tires of London because it takes work, practice, and grit to live in London. 

Cities are often perceived as destinations to be ‘done’, sights to be checked off in rapid succession. But literary walking resists that tempo. It asks us to linger, to reread, to take a slower pace. To walk with a book in mind is to inhabit a place rather than extract from it. In this sense, walking becomes a small ecological ethic, a way of living lightly while seeing deeply. The practice is never finished, just as no book is ever fully read. Each walk is another opportunity for literature to accompany us, shaping how we see and how we are perceived.

An Invitation to Walk With Me (Figuratively at least)

What books have changed the way you walk your city? I’d love to hear your reflections—share them in the comments or reply if you’re reading this via newsletter. If you’d like to explore more practices that blend literature, creativity, and contemplative living, you’re warmly invited to join our Weekly Creative Flow Sessions  this autumn or the new 18-month reading cycle of A Course in Miracles.

As autumn approaches, I hope your own walks—whether with books, with friends, or simply with yourself—offer you fresh ways of seeing the cities you call home.

Embracing Craft in Academia: Reflections on Sabbatical

Posted on by Allan Johnson in academia, Observations

Academia, for all its bureaucratic scaffolding and metricisation (neither of which, in spite of what many would have us believe, is newly arrived on the scene), has always seemed to me less an outcome and more a craft. The language we use is linear and progressive—impact, output, key performance indicators—but the experience is slower and quieter. What looks from the outside like a trajectory of advancement often feels, from the inside, like the painstaking rhythms of practice: revisiting texts, refining an argument, shaping a paragraph until it carries its own weight.

Beginning a period of sabbatical this month has sharpened this distinction for me. Having the time to work on my next book, on liberal theology in early-20th-century America, is an extraordinary privilege, of course, but also a perturbing reminder that the rhythms of academic life are neither fixed nor inevitable. After a six-year term as an associate dean, when my diary wasn’t my own and a truly uninterrupted hour for writing was out of the question, I now find myself in a space where mornings are less prescribed, afternoons more open, and evenings less weighed down by the day’s unanswered emails.

This shift has interrupted the treadmill to which I had grown accustomed: no more weekly meetings or administrative reports, fewer obligations to the tempo of the institution. The contrast is striking. Career logic dictates constant forward motion, progression, and visibility. Sabbatical interrupts that, slowing time to the pace of craft: immersion, attention, revision. After years of deliberately (and at times aggressively) climbing a ladder, it feels now like I am stepping back into the workshop of what I have actually been trained to do: pore over the historical record to better understand what modernist literature means, and, in doing so, cultivate my own scholarly sensibilities in order to train students to do the same.

The language of career encourages us to think in terms of advancement, but the language of craft invites us to think in terms of depth. Career implies a vertical climb: promotion, recognition, and external markers of success. Craft, by contrast, is iterative and circular: you return to the same problems with new tools, you revisit the same materials with a slightly steadier hand. In my ways, this sabbatical is feeling like an unmistakable return, and whether or not my hand is indeed steadier, it is at the very least different to when I began my career.

Pierre Bourdieu’s account of ‘academic capital’ in Homo Academicus explains much about why universities are structured to reward careerist accumulation: advancement depends on how well one plays the game, converting intellectual labour into recognisable forms of capital. But Richard Sennett’s celebration of craft in The Craftsman reminds us that the deeper meaning of scholarly work is found elsewhere: in the long hours of slow reading, the shaping of sentences, the iterative labour of interpretation. Bourdieu undoubtedly shows us the internal logic of the field, but to treat scholarship as craft is to resist the abstraction of labour into capital and to remain grounded in the work itself, the feel of words under the hand, the quiet satisfaction of making something well.

Craft is built not through dramatic leaps but through the slow accumulation of skill over time. Looking back, I see this clearly in my own trajectory. As an undergraduate, I was awkward but diligent; I once arrived late to an exam with an analogue alarm clock whose battery had died, holding it up as evidence. From those unpolished beginnings to my current role as teacher and writer, what has mattered is not sudden transformation but steady honing.

This accumulation resists the logic of outputs. Like any craft, academic practice is tethered to the materiality of tools, spaces, and habits. The scholar’s equivalents of the potter’s wheel or carpenter’s chisel are the library, the notebook, and the annotated text (I’ve also grown accustomed to my ReMarkable tablet but still feel uneasy when I see my disused notebooks glaring back at me from the shelf). 

My own sabbatical days so far have been marked by relocating books and rediscovering notes I had once scribbled in margins, while rearranging my desk into something that feels more like a workshop than an office. Bruno Latour reminds us in Reassembling the Social that tools are never neutral; they co-constitute practice. Academic work, though often presented as disembodied thought (the ‘output’, the ‘paper’, the ‘impact’), is always materially situated. The desk, the chair, the pen, the screen: they are part of the making.

The pressures of modern academia can make it dangerously easy to forget the craft beneath the career, but the dangers of modern academia can make it just as tempting to ignore the career beneath the craft, an evasion that only feeds the very thing we hoped to resist.

I know this from experience. Six years in middle leadership brought tremendous satisfaction but also a creeping drift away from the hands-on craft of my own research. Strategy and oversight are necessary, but they can displace the intimate contact with sources and sentences that drew me to academia in the first place. Sabbatical is, in that sense, a time to retool: to remember the making at the heart of the work. As Stefan Collini asked in What Are Universities For?, what are we serving if we forget the scholarly craft that justifies the institution itself?

My hope for this sabbatical is to deepen the craft. A book will come out of it, but as a tool rather than a product. I want to give myself permission to linger in primary texts, to sketch ideas without rushing to publication, to think slowly. Projects on attachment and literature, and on contemplative approaches to pedagogy beckon, but I want to approach them less as tasks to be completed than as materials to be worked with patiently.

To see scholarship as craft is to reclaim its artistry from the machinery of career. Universities will continue to speak the language of metrics, rankings, and progression, an essential role, because it is this machinery that maintains the workshop in which scholarship can take place. But we don’t have to speak in the same register. To resist or even repudiate the machine is not to undermine the institution but to create the very conditions in which scholarship can breathe: the space for slow thought, patient practice, and the kind of intellectual labour that no metric can capture.

The machinery of career will always hum in the background, but we needn’t let its clatter drown out the quieter sound of practice itself. If these reflections resonate, I explore them further in The Art of Academic Practice on Substack, a space for thinking together about how scholarship might remain both sustainable and alive.

What is a Course in Miracles?

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

If you were to glance at the cover of A Course in Miracles, you might find it a little intimidating.

Gold-embossed title. No back cover blurb. Dense text. Three volumes.

It doesn’t exactly scream “approachable.”

Add to that a name like A Course in Miracles—and it’s understandable why many people assume it’s either ultra-religious, uncomfortably mystical, or some obscure New Age self-help project from the 1970s.

But here’s the truth, and it might surprise you: The Course is none of those things.

It’s not a religion. It’s not a belief system. And it’s not trying to sell you a new worldview.

At its heart, A Course in Miracles is a method of mental and emotional clarity. A structured way of exploring your perceptions, undoing habitual fear-based thinking, and reclaiming the peace that’s already available beneath the noise of the mind.

So What Is It, Then?

Let’s step back a moment.

The Course was written in the late 1960s and early 70s by Helen Schucman, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University. She described it as a form of inner dictation—words that came to her during a time of personal and professional strain, in response to a growing desire to find “a better way” of relating to the world.

Regardless of how we frame its origin, the Course is remarkable in one key respect: it speaks in symbolic, poetic language, but offers psychologically rigorous insights into how perception works—and how often we are the source of our own suffering without realising it.

It doesn’t ask you to believe in anything. Not in the traditional sense. In fact, one of its opening lines is:

“This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary.”

It’s not referring to belief or theology. It’s referring to a kind of deep inner retraining—a shift in how you meet your thoughts, how you interpret experience, and how you move through relationships, conflict, and uncertainty.

A Practice of Undoing, Not Adding More

Most spiritual systems (and most self-help programs) are about adding more.

More positive habits. More affirmations. More rituals. More goals. More ideas.

The Course is different. It’s not additive—it’s subtractive.

It says, essentially: you don’t need to become better, you need to remember who you already are beneath fear. And the way to remember is by undoing the thoughts that block your natural capacity for peace.

This includes thoughts like:

  • “I need to control this situation to be okay.”
  • “If I don’t prove my worth, I’ll be rejected.”
  • “Other people’s approval determines my value.”
  • “I can’t be happy until X happens.”

Rather than challenging those thoughts intellectually, the Course invites you to bring them into awareness and notice what they cost you. Not in moral terms, but in energy, clarity, and presence.

And then it offers an alternative—a quieter, more honest perception. One that doesn’t come from striving, but from stillness.

So, No Dogma? Really?

There’s a common misunderstanding that A Course in Miracles is part of a larger religious or spiritual institution. But it isn’t. There’s no church. No hierarchy. No initiations. y. And no penalties for disagreement.

The Course explicitly says:

“A universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary.”

That experience, for the Course, is peace.

But not peace as a vague ideal. Peace as a felt experience of spaciousness. Of groundedness. Of being free from the constant effort to defend yourself against life.

Robert Holden, a longtime student and teacher of the Course, often describes it as “spiritual psychotherapy.” He calls it a practical, heartfelt path that clears away the false self—not by condemning it, but by recognising it was never needed in the first place.

What Happens in the Study Group?

This is why the Course is best approached with others.

Not because we need to believe the same thing—but because this kind of inner exploration thrives in gentle company. Somewhere between a book club, a reflection circle, and a slow-burn inner workout, our Sunday evening study group provides a regular space to unpack and embody the Course’s core ideas.

We meet weekly (Sundays 7.30–9.00 pm UK time) and work through the Text in small, digestible sections. There’s no pressure to speak, and no prior knowledge needed. The readings are thoughtfully paced to allow insight to land and ripple in your daily life.

Each session is rooted in quiet attention—not performance. You can reflect aloud, or simply listen and take in what resonates.

Over the course of 18 months, we’ll move through the entire Text—the foundation of the Course—together.

When you sign up, you’ll receive the full reading schedule so you always know what we’re covering.

A Language of Peace, Not Preaching

Because the Course uses words like “miracle” and sometimes borrows spiritual terms from Christian mysticism, some readers initially worry that it’s trying to impose a worldview. But the language is symbolic, not doctrinal.

If a word doesn’t resonate with you, you’re encouraged to reinterpret it in a way that does. The Course doesn’t ask for obedience—it asks for honesty. And it reminds us that truth doesn’t need to be defended; it simply needs to be experienced.

I often tell people: don’t let the language throw you. The Course isn’t asking you to believe in anything “supernatural.” It’s inviting you to recognise how many of your perceptions are distorted by fear—and how peace becomes available when those distortions dissolve.

It’s less “join us” and more “come and see.”

This Is a Practice of Clarity

And clarity, for many of us, is in short supply.

We’re overloaded with information, overwhelmed by choice, and often undernourished when it comes to stillness. What the Course offers is not a shortcut—but a framework. A rhythm. A return.

It’s not for everyone. But if you’re someone who’s felt that traditional paths don’t quite fit… or who’s looking for something deeper than the usual spiritual gloss… you may find in the Course a friend you didn’t know you were waiting for.

🌀 Want to explore with us?
Join the weekly group here → https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-vjcggkfq/
You’ll receive the full reading schedule upon registration.