Freedom

Our eyes and ears, thoughts and feelings, empower us to move freely through the extraordinary web of life of which we're a part. But these gifts of perception, as considerable as they may be, are more like a looking glass than they are the keys to that secret kingdom of freedom we seek. With their aid, we can almost see into, and so confirm, that innermost realm where our heart senses we belong.

When things naturally come to a close in life, our pain isn't so much born of the fact that something now ends, as it is that within this moment of ending, we are forced to meet a certain order of emptiness in us for which we are just not prepared. We are brought face to face with a great void in the center of our heart that we thought had been filled. And then we make this common, but largely unrealized mistake...

Knowledge, regardless of its sophisticated nature, is a tool. It arises from and belongs to what has passed. As such it embodies, defines, and relates us to life through what we already know is true about the world around us. By definition, this kind of understanding is limited.

How many of us think that there is no individual action that we're ever going to take as a human being that's going to have global impact, even though all of us would like to be a leader or a hero? I want you to understand there is no such thing as an insignificant act on the part of a person who wants to wake up and be a different human being. Every last one of us is endowed..."

"Do you know why you want freedom? To know why you want freedom, you must know what you want freedom from. And most of us do not know that idea of 'freedom from' -- other than when we're in a bad relationship. What you want is freedom from pain. You want freedom from fear. Freedom from self-doubt. Freedom from feeling inadequate. Freedom from being alone...."

As life pours itself out in the stream of passing time, and we run into challenges seemingly greater than our ability to answer -- each of these encounters "asks" this question of us: "Are you willing to change (who you have been) in order to realize a higher possibility of yourself?" And though moments like these trouble us because of their uncertainty, here's why we should be very grateful...

The only thing that can happen to you when you're in the wrong place is a wrong thing. But even when you find yourself in a "wrong place" inwardly, you don't have to remain there.

We can't change others -- or the purpose of any given moment as it unfolds -- but we can work to place one less demand upon both.

Whenever we find ourselves identified with some dark stream of thoughts and feelings, as opposed to being quietly aware of their downward-trending presence, we fall -- in that same moment -- into a world filled with unwanted negative states. The reason so much of what's going on within and around us seems "bad" is because that's all we can see. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, s...

As we realize that there is no way that painful concern can positively affect any outcome, we drop that concern, and bit by bit, we begin to hear what real life has been trying to tell us all along.

In spite of how things may appear to us, we are never trapped by where we are. The trap is always who we are.

Each time we see the need to let go of something -- a bad habit that drags us down, an unsatisfactory relationship, a career choice that can't complete us in the way we dreamed it would, or maybe unrealistic expectations of ours about others that eventually spoil our partnerships with them -- whatever it may be: what is it that's actually happened in these moments of honest self-examination? S...