Have you ever heard within you, not necessarily in words, something to the effect of "Oh no, not this again!"? Perhaps we're looking at the latest flame of our heart and we see a fire in his or her eyes, but it's not because they are looking at us. In that moment we no longer see the moment unfold as it is, but rather we stand there transfixed -- experiencing the moment as we are; and we are not really present!

Our present experience of life, its happiness or sorrow, is nothing more or less than what certain unconscious parts of us tell us it is. Before we can hope to change our life experience, we must stop trying to re-write the Book of Life and work instead to awaken ourselves from the dreams of the unseen storyteller within us.

It seems natural to fear moments we don't want, to avoid any knock at the door of some untimely event. But it's not these moments themselves that we are afraid of: what we fear is our reaction to them, so that we can't see that this experience we don't want... is actually the pain of a negative reaction as it unfolds within us.

When the doctor taps your knee and it suddenly jerks, you don't get upset with your leg for jumping out of control. Why? Because in that moment, you realize your temporary jumpy experience is an involuntary physical reaction. But how do you view your emotional reactions when they start jerking you around? Not only are they hard on you, but once they're done, you're then hard...

When we have moments where someone or something does what is upsetting to us, we look out and see a world that is out of order, do we not? And the pain we are experiencing in that moment cannot be separated from our perception that this person, this thing is wrong and out of order.

In this life, we have one of two choices when it comes to painful events, past or present. We can either go on hating and fearing what we think life has done to us (or others), and let these negative reactions create our experience for us... or we can learn to use these same dark reactions to free ourselves from them. But just wanting to learn the truth isn't enough...