Don't believe what the spiritual sharks and clever carnival hustlers tell you about fearless living: they lie. But you already sense this is true, or you wouldn't find yourself reading these words. The deepest parts of you know that if freedom from fear was as easy as "creating a new reality" for yourself, then *you would already be the fearless person you know in your heart that you're meant...

In the early 1900s, before the age of superhighways, supermarkets, and the giant food manufacturers, things were very different, better in many ways. Small family farmers used to truck or cart each season's harvest to a small centralized buyers' market that had been set up in their area. Some farmers, more isolated than others, had to travel great distances just to sell their crops. For these...

One of the things that makes letting go seem so difficult is the way in which our spiritually asleep mind looks at life: it sees cause and effect as being separate operations. This means our usual action toward anything that troubles us is to struggle with letting go of that unwanted effect. The problem is our usual reaction blinds us to the fact that the actual cause of our unhappiness is not...

The next time (and every time) you catch some negative thought or feeling that says, "I am anxious," "I am scared," "I am mad," or "I am in so much pain" -- the first thing to do is to come wide awake to yourself. By taking the following inner action, you can deliberately snap yourself out of that dark dream that is trying to weave itself into your identity. Rather than allowing yourself to...

Starting life over again is the key to a new you. Never mind all of those thoughts and feelings that may be telling you this is impossible -- those inner whisperings that either deny the need for this self-newness or that scoff at its possibility. Brush them away with the following helpful insight: self-defeat in the past does not prove that self-victory doesn't exist. Defeat of any kind in li...

There is nothing wrong with being a successful human being. In fact, the purpose of your life is to win. But what if, in your quest for this victory, you were accidentally drawn into a compelling game in which, unknown to you, it was impossible to win no matter how well you performed or religiously followed the "rules?" Where, instead of finding the freedom to run as you wish, you found yours...

We are not meant to be the slave of any negative thought or feeling, nor are we intended to live under the limitations inherent in these darkened states. Our true role is to be the sovereign governor of our interior lives and all that this spiritual estate implies. It is our spiritual right to decide what kind of thoughts and feelings are permitted to roam through our consciousness and to rule...

In order to let go of any painful past condition -- so there is never again a moment where regret or sorrow is pulling us down -- we must allow every movement, each unexpected event encountered, every thought and feeling -- no matter its character -- to have its own life. If we will attempt to view life from this new and higher understanding -- that everything...

Doesn't this make perfect sense? If we need to be rescued from something, then whatever is rescuing us can't be part of what it rescues us from. Said in a different way, you don't jump on a tiger's back to escape a lion. A terrified rabbit running from a fox only thinks he finds safety when a coyote offers him shelter. This shows us that any desperate attempt to escape a trouble usually leads...

When we meet a moment before us that challenges us in some way, we are not meeting some immovable, transient object. In reality, we are meeting nothing more than our understanding of the event. Wherever we are, whatever we're going through, we meet our own understanding. The dimension -- the breadth of any event transpiring before us -- is actually a reflection of the level of self that sees...

We frequently feel ourselves to be under the power of things. We feel we are the victims of an unfair social system, economic upheavals, painful relationships -- even a lawn chair that won't unfold right. We fight these conditions, feeling ourselves to be under their "dark" influence. The fact is, however, these events do not exist as negative events except for our perception of them. The only...

We all know what it is like to be held captive of the little things in life -- those petty concerns and small desires that steal their way into how we look at our lives and pit us against anyone or anything seen as trying to take away our anticipated desire. Here is a short list of these little troublemakers that often make big trouble for us whenever we mistake them for being our friends: *...