Part 1 Giving your mind over to any thought that wants you to revisit something painful in your past is like taking your dog for a walk and, before you make it back home, finding yourself on the leash. Part 2 Believing that re-living something painful from your past will one day liberate you from the suffering that you find there in those same tormenting thoughts is like hoping that a hammer...

For the want of love, pleasure, or approval we often accept within us the guidance of a consciousness so compromised that it is incapable of discerning the difference between fulfilling ourselves and selling our soul.

It is not our duty to suffer over what will be or won't be -- to live with painful regret or guilt over what was or wasn't. Our sole task is to be responsible for what is -- and to allow this relationship with life to produce what it will. There may or may not be suffering in this order of responsibility but, if there is, it will be transformational as opposed to self-tormenting -- which is th...

Who you really are lives above the world of thoughts and feelings. But living from the mental how, we seek answers for painful questions. Living in the spiritual Now, we understand that there is no intelligence in torment, so we simply drop those questions. The everyday mental life, which naturally includes asking how, has its practical place in the world of auto mechanics...

The self-defeating desires that drag us around belong to a nature that always feels incomplete. Nothing this false self tells us to do does one thing to loosen its hold on us. Fighting with it -- as we have done in the past -- only slays "half the foe," while giving in to it leads nowhere but to more self-recrimination. This torment, and all other suffering associated with its kind, is needles...

Part 1 It is a distinct stage in the development of the aspirant when -- rather than being easily distracted by some imagined consolation for his pain, or by concluding who is to blame for it -- his first and real preference in the moment is to increase his consciousness of his condition, and not to find ways around it. Part 2 Every flood begins with a single raindrop -- that becom...

Anxiety is torment. But we never suspect that the mind that is anxious is anxious because it is trying to bring an end to its own pain... and it can't, because there is no peace in the world of a mind set against itself. The problem is that we are born into a world where, within a very short time, we each have our own inner "personal attendant." This attendant has two things in its hands...

Topics covered: If you were present in your life, you would never have questions about it; Is there any value in revisiting failed past relationships; Relationship Magic also applies to your relationship with thoughts and feelings about the past; The past doesn't repeat itself, it's you that repeats; When thought examines thought, nothing changes; Are fantasies okay; Feeling stuck caring for s...

The rush to judge some character flaw in another human being is one and the same as the speed with which the false self races to hide from itself a similar imperfection.

Allowing anything to eat at you -- by consenting to sit at the 'table of torment' -- serves nothing... save the dark and hungry ghost of some past pain that lives only to consume negative energy.

Just because we are able to freely justify, idealize, or otherwise deny the 'in the dark' parts of us that frighten, torment, or otherwise bully us... does not mean that we are free.

Classroom Talk: 9/10/2003 - If you want to stop feeling like a choiceless captive in life, notice how parts of yourself love to catch negative thoughts; then dare to drop this self -- with its torments -- before they drag you down.