Peace and Mental Health.

I am studying A Course in Miracles.  I don't find it easy to admit how important it is to me,  and how I feel my mind changing now. But the Urtext is something else! A kind of practical commentary on the teaching of the course. The word "miracles" is a bit misleading. The Miracles are to do with shifts in perception rather than feeding the five thousand. It makes it sound like a flaky thing, want to learn to turn water into wine?
Especially to a down to earth social worker, who needs to be very pragmatic...
But reading in the Urtext about peace and mental health, it is very clear how the Course "scribes" were psychologists! Peace actually IS mental health and what the Course says seems very relevant to my personal journey and also in thinking about social work and clients.
"Peace is an attribute in YOU. You cannot find it outside. All mental illness is some form of EXTERNAL searching. Mental health is INNER peace. It enables you to remain unshaken by lack of love from without, and capable, through your own miracles, of correcting the external conditions, which proceed from lack of love in others."
Time, almost, to think about this in my life and in a client's life. For example the young mother who needs to detox, and has an 11 year old daughter who does not have anyone to support her or offer her a place to stay for a few weeks. 
I don't know the answer. My first response is to feel stressed and inadequate.  Then to do more assessment. What if there is another way to look at all of this? 
Young mother is convinced that without moving to a particular area, her life is doomed. She is convinced she needs to detox from 15g of diazepam.   She blames her daughter for getting in the way of her recovery and says so loud and clear. Mother and daughter love each other but resent one another too. 
What if young mother were not so fixated on the solutions she has in her mind? What if she let go of detox, and began to make staying calm and and at peace within, her main goal? What if she surrendered the need to make things happen the way she thinks they should, and she could be happy anyway?

Perhaps the problems would just vanish and a new solution would emerge. 

Well, she and her daughter would not need a social worker. And if it's true what I wrote about yesterday, that in Reality all is perfect, than the so called problems are not Real.

It feels amazing and liberating to write this. That this is the first step of spiritual social work. 

Problems are not Real. 

Everything that is confusing, upsetting, painful for my clients and myself is not Real. It is an absence of Love, and in young mother's case, her inner experience is of fear and lack of peace. So the first great gift I can offer, is to be Peace and to see Peace as her true state of being. 

Of course all the problems seem very real and difficult. But at a soul level, they are just clouds of nothingness. 

And maybe I've taken a very important step with this seeing...the first step of what I came into the world to do...spiritual social work.  It's just spiritual problem solving. I can't make young mother change her mind but I can see the truth of her being and everything flows from that. I hold to Peace and don't get sidetracked into making her problem into a very big deal. 

For the first time, I see the invitation to do this with all the situations at work. Seeing her mental pain, remembering the Soul and seeing it's beauty. 

A  new vision of social work....which IS at one with my spiritual path. Where I and my clients are on the same side, whether we know it or not.