Recovery
Question: I have chosen to leave my old life behind me, but the more I try to drop myself, the more difficult I find this to do. It feels like I won't make it!
Answer: Each time you get ready to throw your hands up in the air or toss in the towel, do your best to remember the following, for as strange as this may seem to you as you stand there -- feeling oh-so uncertain -- here's the true perspective to be embraced: These are the good times, not the bad ones! In fact, all along you've been working toward just these moments. Your confusion indicates that you have reached a real inner threshold; you stand before the possibility of entering into something genuinely new to you. And this unthinkable place is the same as the doorway to a new destiny. So take heart! If you'll simply persist with your journey, you'll pass right through these times of trial. The Light from one small moment of honest self-inquiry is more powerful than the accumulated darkness of a million years of doubt. So dare to proceed... and succeed!
Excerpted from Design Your Destiny
Question: What is the best way to "make up" for wrongs you have done in the past to others (betraying, lying, stealing, etc.)?
Answer: All of us have wronged others. Truth be known, until we wake up, we are all -- in one form or another -- in some kind of wrong relationship in life. That is why the key to correcting what we consider to be a faulty past is to work to be awake in the present. The wrong parts of us want to keep themselves alive by continually dragging before our mind's eye all that we have been wrong in doing. Then we react to these images and -- in one form or another -- resist them. All this unconscious act accomplishes is to secretly continue the life of this mistaken perception and the wrong behavior it perpetuates. Drop all of your concerns for what is no longer, and be intent on being conscious of what is before you. This changes things.
Excerpted from Seeker's Guide to Self-Freedom
Question: Is there any value to "clearing away" the wreckage of the past? It seems to help, yet I feel wrong in trying to correct so many wrongs that are behind me.
Answer: The wreckage of the past exists only in the thoughts of the self that keep it alive. Work to "right" in the here and now. Come awake to the pain in rehashing regrets and you will see yourself revisiting the scene of a "crime" long past. These scenes are the nightmares created by a sleeping self and are kept alive by remaining asleep to yourself. Learn to prefer your fresh awareness of the new moment over your frustrating memory of moments gone by. Do this special kind of inner work and the healing you want will follow, which includes the healings necessary with, or in, others. This is a spiritual Law.
Excerpted from Seeker's Guide to Self-Freedom
