What is meditation, and is there some "best" method for its practice? What is prayer and what's the most effective way to pray? Should I be really be asking God for specific things? How can I practice ceaseless prayer? When I sit down to meditate, thoughts crowd in, and I can't seem to find a truly quiet moment. How am I ever going to change if I can't even do this simple exercise?...
Being renewed by Love -- and being willing to begin your life all over again -- are one and the same interior action. Learn what it means to do the latter and the freedom of the former will prove itself time and time again.
Because we are conditioned from birth to see, and experience ourselves as separate from -- “other than” -- what we imagine is needed to make ourselves whole, our search for this missing sense of holiness that we believe is somewhere “outside” of us... ensures we never realize it...
Isn't it phenomenal that we spend our lives trying to produce powers for ourselves to protect and keep in place all the things that we believe are necessary for us to have a life with the least possible worry? And yet, our days are consumed with spending thought and emotional energy trying to figure out how this change affects that, and what that change means over here -- all the time trying to put back together a life we hope to finally have without...
We are born hungry. We not only require food that we take in with our mouths, but we all have an innate need to take in impressions -- to take in the nourishment that stimulates our mind, that moves our heart, and that works to give us a sense of satisfaction in life. When we're young, we have a natural appetite for life, and we are educated by going out and engaging in the world...
Would you like to make the most out of every moment of your life? If we want to make the most out of every moment of our life, we have to let every moment in our life touch us. We have to learn to listen to it, to receive it. If we want to be lifted by it, we have to let it hold us. But instead of being touched by moments, we're touched by thought. We're touched by irritation...
The moment I feel resistance, the moment I feel that contraction inside of me, I must understand that I am being introduced to myself. I've been brought to the bear, to touch the bear! That anger, that rage, that impatience appears in us. You and I know we have these states in us. We can dress up and appear pretty and appear like we're in control of ourselves, but every last human being...
When we understand that self-knowledge is to our spiritual growth what a spring rain is to the wildflower seeds that await it, then we also realize how vital it is to not just embrace these higher laws but embrace them mind, body, and soul.
Whenever someone says something cruel, or otherwise does the unthinkable to us, our position towards this hurtful event is "calculated" right within our ensuing reaction to it -- a reaction that describes to us the nature of the perceived attack even as it formulates a response to it. But our red-seeing reactions read only the content of their own right to exist. Their report, all based upon t...
It is our fear of being alone and in doubt, of wanting to feel certain that what we are doing is right, that compels us to seek the approval of others. So this tells us that the chief cause of why our lives so often wind up in the hands of others is not that they are superior or that the world is too strong for us, but that we don't want to face the uncertainty and aloneness we think we are to...
"I want to be brave when it comes to cutting myself loose from self-destructive situations, but each time I even get close to letting go, I get really scared. And when I get scared, I seem to hold on to everything even tighter! Is there a way to get past this fear? I loathe the idea that I may be too frightened to find freedom." "Yes. There is a way past this part of yourself that would rathe...
No one can hope to know the joy of true personal freedom without knowing the truth of spiritual peace. Freedom and peace are as kite and wind; the former remains grounded without the latter. This is to say that before we will feel ourselves being lifted above the conflict and illusions of this world, peace must become conscious within us. Peace is the foundation, freedom the form built upon it...