Through our willingness to work deliberately at placing our usual self in "second place," we agree not only to change the way we see our relationships, but we also agree to be changed by the truths our new relationships will inevitably show us about us.

When you want to know the powers that circulate through a quiet mind, you must take yourself to that place where this silent strength can make itself known to you. To go quiet, you must go within.

Our experience in life is what it is teaching us: that the whole business of reaching for what we do and the way we do it is incapable of producing the perfection that our heart is looking for. What is it about seeing a great performer, a great athlete, a great mind that makes them seem so special? Is it what they have been able to bring into their lives as a result of what they love? Or is it the love itself that the person has become an expression of?

Sometimes we feel discouraged because our past efforts to meaningfully change our lives have not prevailed over what challenges us. We think, why bother to try now? Perhaps we are disheartened because one of our main hopes for happiness suddenly proves hopeless. Maybe we get downcast some days because our body, or our mind, is no longer capable of doing what it once could in our younger years...

Have you ever had appear in your mind the image of someone who hurt you, or run a whole mental movie about something that didn't work out, so that in recalling the event you actually relived the sense of loss? How does such a painful image seem to stay in the mind, especially given the fact of how much we struggle to make it go away? We all know how it feels to try and "fix" such visitations,...

One maxim of self-development I sense is true is that the way out of any stressful situation is to "go through it." How does this approach apply to reducing stress-producing thought-attacks? Everything depends upon our ability to inwardly discriminate between thoughts and feelings that are for us as opposed to those that are against us. Whenever confronted with an onslaught of internal i...

It isn't this world that threatens or disturbs us. We are dominated by our own thoughts and feelings. We are taken over by our own reactions. This is painful for us because our original nature, our True Self, longs to be free and unencumbered by self-limiting, self-defeating, compulsive thoughts and feelings. The problem is, at our present undeveloped level, we believe that another person...

All through the ages the Wise Ones have spoken of an invisible kingdom--a timeless ground known as the Now--that will confer to those who realize it a peace that surpasses all understanding.

An inner place of safety exists. If we stand in that new position, no dark feelings can affect us. That position has always been there, waiting for us to find it. It is the place where the True Self resides. But we have mistakenly believed that only two options were open to us: to either stand and suffer, or run away and suffer, with our problems in constant pursuit. We always listened to the...

And I saw a vision of a gleaming white castle with a narrow footpath leading up to its great white gates. This walkway -- extending out from the gates as far as the eye could see -- was so worn that it appeared to the eye as a kind of cut-mark several feet deep. And when I asked a nearby angel as to the nature of this Bright Place -- and why the path leading up to it was so well-worn, she repl...

What is it that makes us feel powerless when someone does something and it punishes us, or we hear some unwanted news? Let's examine it. Something happens that I don't like, and what am I looking at in that moment? I'm not looking at the thing that I don't like. What I'm "looking at" is the whole condition of myself that feels challenged, threatened by, overcome through whatever it is that it sees. But what does it see other than something that it resists?

Negative states, all dark energies that enervate us, only succeed at draining us because they are capable of making us see mentally and emotionally charged images of past defeats.