I was lying in bed at 3:00 in the morning—in a country on the other side of the globe from my home—wide awake and seething. I was so angry and frustrated that I couldn’t sleep, which only added to my frustration. 

I was on a small team that was designing sales education programs for a global company, and we were in Europe, piloting the program in several countries. It was a high-pressure work environment, and our team leader was exacting in every detail. I was exhausted, feeling as if I could do nothing right, even though I was working as hard as I could. I had regularly been staying up well past midnight, carefully checking and proofing materials, then waking up at 6 a.m. to start all over again. So it made me angry that our leader could only find fault with me.

As I lay in bed, a thought popped into mind: “I bet she’s not lying awake right now.” This thought jogged me out of the all-absorbing anger. My team leader was likely sleeping peacefully, not lying awake trying to cause me harm. She wasn’t doing anything to me. The “villain” here was actually “mortal mind,” which is explained in the Christian Science textbook as “the flesh opposed to Spirit, the human mind and evil in contradistinction to the divine Mind, or Truth and good” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 114). My colleague had no power over my thoughts or experience—and in reality, neither did mortal mind.