When some anxiety comes along and takes over your life, are you an awake, inwardly centered person or are you an unconscious, outwardly driven man or woman? Which are you? That you're outwardly directed is pretty obvious. Why? Because that anxious state could not exist without your false belief that who you are -- your well-being -- is connected to something happening exterior to yourself. And...

We find it natural to seek relief from the world around us, a world appearing to be one stronghold atop another of stressful conditions and anxiety-producing events. Accordingly, we seek relief from these contentment-crushing states by struggling to change those circumstances we see as being responsible for their cause. Think of all the ways we've attempted to escape those unwanted pressures...

When we turn on a faucet connected to a hose with a small nozzle at its other end, we know from experience that we have to keep the hose in hand, otherwise we will likely get soaked chasing down the runaway end. What happens is that the water pressure, as it passes through the nozzle, transforms our ordinarily tame garden hose into the equivalent of a tethered rocket. With this picture in min...

There is an immense reason why we do not develop spiritually. It is because when it is time to act, our intellects become frozen and get locked up in the trap of "should I" or "shouldn't I.". Instead of properly acting on impulse in the present moment, we have become people who always defer to a conflict that exists in thought. Every impulse to act is the same as the opportunity to discover a...

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...

Nothing is set in real life, but we live from a mind-set that wants to get things settled. Just when we think we have everything taken care of -- when all of our ducks are in a row -- life seems to come along and place another demand upon us. In general, we would prefer that nothing interfere with our carefully constructed plans. What is the nature of a mind that is always scrambling to put e...

There is an ancient idea, perhaps best expressed in the New Testament, which states that before a human being can hope to awaken, he or she must have not enemies. When you lie to someone, you have automatically made an enemy because you will always resist that person out of fear that he or she will expose your lie at any given moment. Therefore, not only have we made an enemy when we lie, we a...

The following six lessons contain special understanding about the nature of invisible pressure-filled states that cause human beings to run themselves ragged. The clearer we can see the reasons for why our lives are always in such a rush, the sooner we arrive at the true solutions that allow us to slow down, take command, and realize the relaxed pace of Real Life. Study each lesson separately...

When all you have is yourself, you have to be afraid. And yet if you really had possession of yourself, fear would not have any power over you. And if we're really honest with ourselves, we can see that presently we lose ourselves all of the time. We are always trying to hold in place who we think we are supposed to be. That is not freedom. Being yourself is not the same thing as straining to...

What happens in the moment where life throws something at us, or nothing goes as we had planned? We know what happens. Instant negativity! We become disgruntled. Unhappiness over what is unwanted ruins the day. Why? Because now we're resisting the event, wanting nothing to do with it. And how many possibilities do we have in such moments when we resist life like this? None . . . except to...

It is possible for us to learn to attract success, instead of trying to chase it down through years of toil, disappointment, and heartache. So how do we do it? How do we learn to attract the success we want instead of letting the desire for the objects of success push us around from problem to problem? The answer is simple: We begin to doubt what compromises us. This means that we will no lo...

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...