This may sound like a strange idea to you at first, but the truth behind it holds a great hope for those of us who feel that we are held down or back by past painful choices. Just as good fruit must ripen before we can know its sweet nourishment, so is it true when it comes to "bad" fruit...those mistaken choices made in our past that hold us prisoner in the present moment, whatever their nature. The conditions that we live in -- the nature of our experience in those conditions (moment to moment) -- are an expression of a consciousness that made -- or that continues to make -- the interior choices responsible for creating that reality; of this there can be no doubt. The key here is to understand the following: when this bitter fruit ripens, and reveals to us where we had unknowingly compromised our own best interests along the way, we must not hate the fruit! The resistance to, or resentment of our situation is misdirection on the part of the very same mind that placed us where we now feel ourselves being punished. Instead of seeing this projected "badness", what we must learn to see is the authentic goodness of having been awakened to that actual level of self. For now, by the light of a new awareness, we are not only aware of an aspect of ourselves that made the choices it did, but what wants to protect them by causing us to feel fear should we choose to make a new start.

It would be inappropriate for me or anyone else to tell you what you should do with the living situation within which you now find yourself. This much I will say: welcome, and continue to welcome the awareness you have of your growing dissatisfaction with what you are inwardly...Never forgetting that what we experience, as well as attract to ourselves, is the direct expression of our present interior nature. The key to remember here is that the authentic new life we long for is not something we create by imagining something better, or by hating what and where we are; rather it comes to us as we see, with absolute clarity, that we can no longer continue being who and what we have been. The arrival of a new life is preceded by our departure from the old one. And though it seems to take a lot to get us moving, as we see the truth of ourselves...freedom's shore grows closer and closer.