Our attention connects us to life; it establishes our relationships with all that unfolds around and within us.

Everyone wonders whether or not there is one Great Secret for truly successful living. There is. And it is not a secret. It has been quietly, steadily telling itself right in front of us all along. We just couldn't hear it over the clatter and chatter of our own secret demands. Listen quietly for a moment. Everything can change right now. Learning to hear this Supreme Secret is no more difficu...

The chief cause of why our lives so often wind up in the hands of others is not that they are superior or that the world is too strong for us, but that we don't want to face the uncertainty and aloneness we think we are too weak to bear. ~~~ The conscious refusal to go along with what your weakness wants you to do to escape its uncertainty is what invokes and finally delivers real inner co...

There is at work in us an undetected nature that will not allow the cause of our pain to pass so that healing may take place. Can we see that we have parts of us that just won't let go of being angry with someone who got angry with us? But that's not all! Can we also see that these same smoldering parts of ourselves would have us believe that being on fire is the best way to get over being bu...

When we're in pain most of us will do whatever seems necessary to bring relief. Almost any behavior can be justified when pain pushes us far enough, but we need not, and must not, handle it as we've always been directed to in the past. What we do need is to grow in our understanding of it. There are many things that have happened and that are happening in this world that are, at best, diffic...

Rebecca had decided that her best chance of getting hired by a company doing geological survey work in the Alaskan wilderness was to earn a private license to fly twin-engine planes. A few days later she began taking lessons from a wise old bush pilot, highly respected throughout the region for his cool and collected ways of dealing with the worst possible situations. After the mandatory gro...

Suffering doesn't prove that someone else is wrong. What it does prove is you will go to any lengths, including self-destruction, to prove that you are right. ~~~ Instead of always asking yourself why doesn't so-and-so see how wrong they are, learn to ask Is what I'm feeling about that person right now good for me? Or them? ~~~ See the upset not as an exterior circumstance to be reme...

We have yet to recognize the fact that our thinking about any painful event as something real, solid and unavoidable is one of the conditions that perpetuate it. Take one thing out of the conjunction, and it is no longer the same event. When we stop giving our life energy to any moment which seems overpowering, it loses its illusion of power. In that moment is also lost our prior belief that w...

Truth wants you to know that it is never in your best interest to unconsciously suffer, no matter how inwardly convincing it may feel to you that you will be betraying yourself or someone else if you don't. The only way that any suffering feeling can prove to you that you need it is to hypnotize you with a flood of itself. Step back from yourself. Learn instead to listen to the quiet stream of...

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...

Doesn't it feel at times as though we are all shipwrecked on an island of confusion and stormy emotions? And that over time we've all but forgotten it's possible to live any other way? Where our days are spent either hiding from the storms, or building inadequate shelters to protect ourselves while doing nothing real to get rescued? Yet, something in us knows that there will never be an end to...

When faced with any pain or grief -- past, present, or promised -- the first thing our lower nature, the "me mind," usually asks is: "What's to be done? Who can I speak to about it? What's the best way for me to handle it? Is there any way out?" And at the heart of these complaints, whether detected or not, is the me mind's favorite question: "Why does everything happen...?"