When you begin to doubt everything you believe about your suffering, you will see that you never had to remain in the path of those destructive storms at all.

Whenever some dark storm appears in us, we must awaken to ourselves and bring ourselves back into the Now.

Every time we accept a negative state we compromise ourselves and increase the level of conflict for ourselves and everyone we meet.

Have you ever gotten angry at a knot? Maybe you couldn't get your shoelace undone, or clear that fishing line. A knot in a thin gold or silver neck chain can be especially difficult. When you fight with a knot you feel frustration. Now, if you think about it logically, clearly the knot has no intelligence of its own with which to thwart your intentions or make you feel angry. Yet when you figh...

Sometimes we feel discouraged because our past efforts to meaningfully change our lives have not prevailed over what challenges us. We think, why bother to try now? Perhaps we are disheartened because one of our main hopes for happiness suddenly proves hopeless. Maybe we get downcast some days because our body, or our mind, is no longer capable of doing what it once could in our younger years...

Whatever it is that we wish to let go of must be something from which we wish to be free. This may be unpleasant or troubling relationships, a problem-filled past or fearful future, any form of addiction, recent painful events -- or any of those disturbing thoughts and feelings about these same troubling things that we no longer want in our lives. The truth is that troubles like these come wi...

If we see how much of our unhappiness is self-created, through being inattentive to our own interior life, then accordingly, we can learn to re-direct our attention, placing it where we will within what is right and bright. But, there is only one way to realize this reversal: we must work to see how wrongly directed attention works against us. Perhaps a thought pops into your mind about a pr...

Here is an exercise to help you take the first step up and away from self-punishing feelings. This exercise is called: Is This What I Really Want? You do not have to accept any inner condition that compromises your happiness. Read over the next sentence several times before proceeding further. It is never right to feel wrong no matter how right you may think you are to be feeling that wa...

Nothing is more discontented than our lower nature, the false self. It is always unhappy with one thing or another. If there is one weed in a field of roses, you can bet that is what it will see. Since it has no real life of its own, it must endlessly create stimulating thoughts and feelings of one kind or another in order to give it the sensations of being alive. Like Sisyphus, the king of an...

Isn't it true that the minute something happens, there is a reaction that takes place to the event, and the reaction forms as a stimulus by which we then want to figure out how to resolve this pain that we're in, fix the person, or change the condition so that the disturbance we're feeling will go away? This means that in the moment where there is disturbance, we are meeting the disturbance w...

Two men stroll down a leaf-covered wood-lot path on a clear, brisk Autumn morning. Jeff and Mark have been friends for years. They enjoy their Saturday morning walks and talks together. Yet, something's different about Mark today. Jeff senses there's a problem. But he says nothing. Two minutes later Mark stops walking, and turns to Jeff. His eyes are searching for a place to begin. Then, foll...

How many times in a day do we find ourselves having gone after something that we wanted, only to find ourselves "gotten" or "done in" by what we have reached for? Then what happens? The crying, complaining, bitterness, blaming starts: "Oh, why is this happening to me? This isn't right!" We can't see how we actually participated in producing the moment in which we find ourselves compromised, an...