Most of us carry, buried in the depths of ourselves, untold amounts of unconscious woe. Regardless of our religion, skin color, social position, or cultural conditioning, psychological pain plays no favorites... and we all pay the price of the ensuing blame game.

From battles with family and friends, all the way up to world conflict, wars persist because the pain that drives this great divide between us is not understood; in the end, it is the ignorance of this pain that manifests war. So, even though it isn't exactly a popular study, we must examine our suffering. It is a law: what remains concealed can never be healed. Only true self-knowledge can bring an end to our tears, whatever their nature. In the end, the only way out of any suffering is to wake up and walk away from the self-ignorance from out of which it pours. Use the following new self-knowledge to help you step into the sunlight of your true self.

Wherever there is opposition, resistance follows. For instance, in nature, in the physical world, this kind of conflict is natural, necessary, and accepted. After the winds pass, the trees they've touched -- having been exercised and duly strengthened, accordingly -- resume their natural course of life. They don't stand there and resent the wind that stirred them up and perhaps even stripped them of their beautiful leaves. This interaction between what is active (the wind) and what is passive (the tree) sees to the gradual perfection of everything created -- or at least it's intended to.

Whenever we experience unwanted moments, or "winds" that challenge both our vessel and our vision of some safe harbor to come, we resist them tooth and nail. We fight with almost anything or anyone who seems to oppose us, struggling in vain to control or avoid what we see as punishing us. And for this opposition we reap its result: the unconscious pain of being in conflict with life's higher purposes.

What we fail to realize, however, is that without those opposing forces working their way in and upon us, inertia would rule the day: our nature would be unable to change. Strange as it seems, without consciously realizing our own limitations, it's impossible for our understanding to grow; and, without higher self-awareness, we could never come to this vital realization:

Life will always give you something greater than what it's asked you for, providing you're willing to let go of that part of yourself that, for fear of the new, favors what's old. It's impossible to cling to who you have been... and be free of yourself at the same time.

Your success depends upon being able to see that real life is secretly a single, beautiful movement incapable of contradicting itself. The more you understand how this one truth includes everything that happens to you, the more you'll be willing to let go and enter into the flow of even your most unwanted moments!

In this light, the old adage "let go and let God" takes on a whole new meaning; it is a single action born of two harmonizing parts: the need to release yourself from a part of yourself that no longer serves your best interests, and the simultaneous rebirth of a new order of self beyond anything you could have imagined.