The main thing that everyone seems to forget when it comes to trying to escape one's own fears and sorrow is that it's impossible to run away from yourself.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of May 28, 2018. It is from out of one's unconscious fear of death that comes the frustration, pain, and inevitable sense of regret born of trying to steal a feeling of being alive.

Classroom Talk: 4/11/2021 - All unconscious negative reactions -- with others, events, or with ourselves -- deflect this one crucial revelation: as long as we meet life with any compulsive demand or unseen craving, we can't help but be painfully remanded into the hands of one self-punishing reaction after another. Anger, fear, and frustration are...

More times a day than we want to acknowledge, we feel powerless. In such moments, for whatever reason, we see our situation as being without a solution. Confusion starts coloring our considerations. Frustration grows and surrounds us, and we find ourselves imprisoned behind a wall of fearful expectations. But we need not, and must not accept being sentenced to a life of such limitation. We c...

Classroom Talk: 6/28/2020 - Part 1: The futility and inevitable frustration of trying to "fit" the Immeasurable into our present level of consciousness is like spending a day at the sea shore, and then hoping to take the ocean home with us... in our sand pail. Part 2: We live in a world the size of our present understanding...

All acts of impatience serve to secretly deflect the one critical revelation that as long as we meet life with any unseen demand, we can't help but be painfully remanded into the hands of one of these two self-punishing states: anger or frustration. They are the bridesmaids of any desire thwarted.

Classroom Talk: 9/22/2021 - Part 1: The real reason for impatience with ourselves, or with any other... has nothing to do with what, or who is blamed for it: impatience -- along with its dark fraternal twin, frustration -- is born of unseen resistance to the sudden appearance of a limitation, including what is required of us to remain conscious (of it) until it's transformed.

Classroom Talk: 7/21/2024 - Until the peace and pleasure found within us is equal to - or greater than any consolation found outside of ourselves - then our power to be patient, loving, and profitable in every moment is, at best, conditional; nothing better serves to sustain anger, frustration, and fear than being identified with a level of self whose life is founded, at best, upon the sands of passing circumstances.

There is one essential reason why there is so much constant heartache and war on this earth, and why conflict has continued as it has down through the ages. The answer may surprise you. We do not understand our own pain -- our suffering. Six-and-a-half billion human beings live in ignorance of their pain. But this is not to say that we live pain-free. In fact, without exception, human beings...

Classroom Talk: 11/03/2024 - Persistence – without our awareness of the parts of us that steadily insist there’s no further we can go – is a recipe for frustration; this painful sense of self slowly morphs from simple despair into an unholy cynicism that, in turn, serves to confirm what we see as our own unwanted, but unavoidable conclusion: we’ve no other choice but to give up our wish to transcend whatever limitation we’d been called to outgrow.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of August 26, 2013. Until the peace and pleasure found within you is equal to -- or greater than any consolation found outside of yourself -- then your power to be patient, loving, and profitable in every moment is, at best, conditional; nothing better serves to sustain anger, frustration, and fear than being identified with a level of self whose life is...

Student Talks: 7/26/2024 - Key Lesson: Until the peace and pleasure found within us is equal to -- or greater than -- any consolation found outside of ourselves -- then our power to be patient, loving, and profitable in every moment is, at best, conditional; nothing better serves to sustain anger, frustration, and fear than being identified with a level of self whose life is founded, at best, upon the sands of passing circumstances.