The hardest part of the journey along the upward path is the gradual realization that one's work to awaken is, at best, imperfect. Along the ascending path each footfall serves to echo an unwanted reminder of one's imperfect actions, imperfect thoughts, imperfect emotions, imperfect devotion, imperfect attention, so forth on and so on. However, seeing the truth of oneself in this light is but...

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of June 27, 2016. The repetition of patterns, even painful ones, is a form of safety to a mind that prefers to remain asleep to itself... because in the continuation of the known it finds a fitful kind of rest, even as it talks to itself about how much it hates being stuck in a rut!...

We grow through our relationships with life, which means that through them we are shown possibilities about ourselves we never knew existed.

The missing spiritual key -- needed to forgive those who have hurt us -- is found in our own awakening wish to be forgiven for having been deceived, and then seduced into believing there could ever be a valid reason for hating anyone.

When we meet a moment before us that challenges us in some way, we are not meeting some immovable, transient object. In reality, we are meeting nothing more than our understanding of the event. Wherever we are, whatever we're going through, we meet our own understanding. The dimension -- the breadth of any event transpiring before us -- is actually a reflection of the level of self that sees...

Real spiritual strength is realized, slowly, by daring to detect and drop the blind negative states that we've been allowing to define us.

Freedom from regret, hate, anxiety, and rage -- and making useless excuses for being compromised by these negative states -- begins as we stand in the light of this rescuing realization: unwanted moments, whatever their nature, do not cause the pain we find in them; rather, they serve to reveal a level of our consciousness already in pain, and looking for something to blame for it.

Look closely for all of the inner gold locked within the wisdom of the following fact. Your extra efforts here will pay off handsomely. If you can't see some thought or feeling as it goes through you, then you don't have the choice whether to be that thought or feeling or not. So, before we can choose not to compromise ourselves, we must first become acutely aware of those thoughts of our...

In order to have a sunny life on a moment-to-moment basis, you must be willing to let something new happen to you. No one sincerely asks for a new life until they are thoroughly dissatisfied with the old one. Letting go of the old ideas is the only way to really invite something new. This is what we are learning to do with the help of these higher ideas. Let's look at one example of how our...

There is one way, and one way only, that any of us will ever know the real meaning behind the life of Christ, and that is... to share in his death. And by this, I do not mean symbolically, or by any other allegory. If our wish is to know the truth behind his seemingly incomprehensible, incomparable act of self-sacrifice -- and the rebirth that crowns this surrender -- there's but one thing to...

What about you? Are you sure you have to go down with that ship called an abusive relationship, substance abuse, or the self-pity that always attends these punishing states of self? Do you see yourself as someone addicted to something, and believe this sinking condition is the way it has to be? Does it feel as though there is no way out from under that barrage of negative thoughts and feelings...

Isn't it true that the minute something happens, there is a reaction that takes place to the event, and the reaction forms as a stimulus by which we then want to figure out how to resolve this pain that we're in, fix the person, or change the condition so that the disturbance we're feeling will go away? This means that in the moment where there is disturbance, we are meeting the disturbance w...