Do you find yourself going through your day, running around like some mad human being, trying to juggle the pieces of your life to make them fit into some picture you've imagined? Have you had enough of suffering uselessly over your best attempts to change those daily experiences? Then here's what you need to consider:

How can we hope to change the nature of any unwanted experience until we do the inner work of changing the lower level of consciousness responsible for the way we experience it? Here's the fact: nothing is going to change without this work to wake up and see our part in what the moment has revealed.

If you do work to become aware of how you punish yourself daily, you'll finally get sick and tired of the weight of yourself that you carry with you everywhere. You'll see how you sit with it, walk with it, your face bears it... and you wear it like a crown. And it's a terrible, useless suffering that is powerfully gravitational. This nature is so used to the weight of, "Oh what a day, what happened, my health and my problems, the people, the temperature... it's all just terrible!"

There you are, walking around with ten thousand pounds of false self, and you need to get sick of it. Because there is no escaping it other than finally recognizing that you wear it like a robe, your badge of courage -- this notion that the heavier I feel, the more real I am. And of course, the heavier I feel, the more I have to do something to get rid of the terrible weight that I think my family and the world has thrust upon my shoulders... and I'm the one who must carry all that weight!

Part of our work is beginning to recognize our tendency to not just carry the weight of yesterday, or the weight of tomorrow, but to create the very weight that we then complain about having to carry the more we think about it, producing the Karma that we say is the responsibility of conflict in the world and other people who "just don't get us." We accept our justification of useless suffering as being the reason why the pain is there. And the more you talk to yourself about why you suffer, the more you suffer Karma -- which is just the revelation of what is not balanced.

We have the opportunity of seeing, in every moment, that we have been resisting that imbalance our entire life. Something happens that we don't like and we're angry, upset, worried, anxious. We don't think to ourselves that we're a heavyweight -- meaning we've got resistance going on -- instead of understanding the moment is trying to show us we're out of balance. And how do we rebalance the moment of revelation that shows us we are out of balance? Can we see the good of this, or do we just see the good of justifying, rationalizing, and explaining everything about that suffering to ourselves? That's what we do, isn't it?

So, our "rebalancing" is ludicrous. The balancing given to us by grace is to see that we have come into the moment needing balance, but that grace is rejected in favor of temporarily giving ourselves the sense that everything is OK because we can explain it to ourselves. And every explanation, every ambition, every justification that comes out of us after that is what? More Karma.

It boggles our minds that there could be something so perfect, so loving that it would neverendingly create the conditions that presently we say we don't want instead of understanding that "the way it is" shows us "the way it needs to be" with our participation in this ceaseless eternal movement of balance and reconciliation.

We get exactly what we give. Not one thing more, not one thing less. We never think to ourselves that what we're getting in the moment is because something in us demands from this moment that it free us from the weight of ourselves or that it gives us something more to bear our weight with. But we can learn to use every moment of our life -- and we have to if we're going to be authentic aspirants, meaning those who are willing to answer the question that sits in the heart of every disturbance: Will I be part of the reconciliation, or will I part myself from it and try to change things according to my will?

If you want to know how far along the interior path you are, measure the number of times you fall into that state of useless suffering over what someone or something does, or some moment that comes to you that you want nothing to do with at all. Look at how much you suffer over it, and you'll know how much further there is for you to go. But you'll also start to understand the point of all truth teachings, and the point of every revelation, which is to play your part in the reconciliation of consciousness as a whole.