One of your "key lessons" says: "Don't be the least concerned if you can't seem to find the time -- or the energy -- to get going because of life's seemingly endless "duties" to family or friends. Drop these punishing (and false) ideas." Do you suggest ignoring responsibility and family... or the way one thinks about such responsibilities? (From student correspondence)...

We're often led to act against ourselves by an undetected weakness that goes before us -- trying to pass itself off to others -- as a strength. This is secret self-sabotage. It sinks us in our personal and business relationships as surely as a torpedo wrecks the ship it strikes. Any person you feel the need to control or dominate -- so that he or she will treat you as you "think" you should b...

We can either spend our lives fearful of any unwanted event that comes along to challenge our sense of self -- or we can use that same situation to help set ourselves free. Presently we see whatever troubles us through the eyes of a false nature that believes protecting itself from what it fears is the same as being fearless. The only way this idea makes sense is if we think that avoiding a pr...

There are some things we should all know -- without having to think about it: humanity is headed in the wrong direction. Everyone knows this except for those who believe they can benefit from tearing their own ship apart -- while it's still at sea -- in order to sell its pieces at a profit. But, much as in the timeless story of "The Emperor's Clothes," where no one would speak the truth of th...

Topics covered:  So much of the pain that we have in life is not because of what life present to us. The pain is in our ambition to prove that we are what we have imagined ourselves to be; Real life is a process of discovery. Real discovery is not the enlargement of oneself. Rather, it is the realization that real life is immeasurable; We have a perpetual internal scoreboard that is always measuring how we are doing in the moment. It doesn't want to come out of the moment thinking that it has lost. It wants other people to know that they have lost. It is a set of eyes that measures life instead of meeting it.

The true purpose of any troublesome "mountain" that seems to appear out of nowhere -- standing directly between us and what we want -- isn't to make us into better climbers, or even to finally crest its summit...

Question: I have suffered from anxiety for years, experiencing many "irrational" fears that have become obsessions. Sometimes it seems that I am going crazy, and I even think of killing myself.

In your book on Breaking Codependency, you refer to "desire" as us wishing for something. For me, desire is a natural impulse to create in the universe. Without it we would never be compelled to move. Don't you think that the word "want" more accurately expresses the lack we feel when we don't have something and the sense that having it will complete us?...

Can you explain to me about forgiveness? Is forgiveness (and "making amends") something that I (a recovering addict) need to address? It seems silly to think I need to drag up every person from my past that I did something hurtful to. But what about those BIG relationships as in family? Will forgiveness and amends help in the healing of me?...