Here is a new and true beginning you can start with today that will put you in the right place for leaving an old self-defeating choice behind you for good: Any time someone criticizes or corrects you, dare to go against your habitual urge to defend yourself. Instead of reacting with heated resistance to something you don't want to hear about yourself, just listen to what's being said.

Our lives are meant to be bright, noble, and ever ascending. This promise of our true potential is made good in us by fulfilling our possibilities and not through the interminable struggle of trying to prove what is impossible. Most of our sorrows are the stressful offspring of trying to be something we have no real need to be; they are born for attempting to do...

To be a human being is to seek. There is a part in us that is incessantly seeking something. We are never not looking. When we start out in life, we have inside of us this longing, this seeking, and we look for something that will answer whatever it is that has come into us that says it needs something in order to complete itself. For example, I'm eighteen years old, and into my mind comes...

Psychological suffering is a waste of life. It is pointless, cruel, and above all deceptive. I say deceptive because psychological suffering is an unnecessary pain that we are presently certain is not only necessary, but actually unavoidable . . . a part of real life. Mental and emotional suffering are not a part of real life. You do not have to live with any tormenting thoughts or feelings no...

Unconscious conflicts, in dialogue form, play themselves out in our mind by painfully reenacting various scenes from our past; moments gone by in which we either know, or sense, we were compromised by our own weakness. If these inner dialogues were left to themselves as they popped into our mind, they'd be as powerless to disturb us as an echo is to change its own sound. Where we get into tr...

By changing the ingredients of our life recipe from false images and negativity to awareness and understanding, we discover a new sweetness in life.

To consider this lesson more deeply, here is a telling story about how dark states find their way into us and then look for someone else to justify their existence: One day, a little angel who wanted to be a big angel was spending some time with a more seasoned angel. They were invisibly walking down a busy city street, and the older angel said to the apprentice angel: "Would you like to hear...

In this excerpt from the Intimate Enemy you will discover a new understanding to heal the pain that arises out of our own misperception.

How do we normally develop a new skill? For example, how do we learn to high jump? We listen to instruction, and perhaps we watch someone else; but for the most part, we learn by doing; by trying it ourselves. Generally, with our first attempts we end up crashing into rather than clearing the bar, and when we do, there's no denying it. We can see, and feel, that we've come up short. Our coll...

Here are seven separate Higher Facts about the proof and the possibility of the Fearless Life. Taken alone, each of the following statements supplies insight into the seemingly impenetrable darkness that surrounds any fear. Taken altogether, these Higher Ideas reveal a whole New Understanding that penetrates fear's protective shell -- dispelling both the feared and the fearful at once. The Lig...

We already have all the pain that we need to change, but none of it is conscious. Until it becomes conscious, it is impossible to change. We live in illusion, perpetuate the pain, and even add more to it whenever we avoid seeing our actual condition in the present moment.

We have all felt the pain that comes with resentment, anger, depression, or any other negative state. But the sense of self, the identity that seems to be real whenever we feel those states is a fabrication. That self can only continue to exist as long as we believe the story it tells us about why it is necessary to suffer.