Depending on how the day breaks for us, we often find ourselves feeling discontent about our life, experiencing any or all of the following conditions whenever we: Find ourselves unable to change or control someone near to us. Take a close look at our physical appearance and find we are somehow lacking. Run headlong into self-compromising behaviors beyond our seeming strength or ability to change...
Can you see that there is something inside of you that immediately begins to tell you what any event means and what you need to do about it? You've been with this storyteller for so long, it's an unquestioned presence in your mind. It's just part of what we call our life. But this storyteller isn't really alive. Its story is to ensure the continuation of its life...
Every time you get negative, you drain from yourself something vital to the development of your soul. But every time you catch yourself in those dark waters that carry you away, you add something to your development by working to understand them. The source of those dark, raging waters is an illusion. It is the illusion that is part and parcel with the present activity of your mind...
For the majority of us, what we call being renewed has nothing to do with what is real renewal. Mostly what we feel as renewal is when some idea or a hope that we have gets fulfilled, filling us in turn with a sense of excitement; and then, in that feeling of being full of ourselves, comes a certain kind of pleasure that we take as being the same as self-renewal in this life.
We have a nature that thinks about itself -- a nature that weighs itself on a scale that our culture has created and our thoughts have unconsciously adopted. Unexamined, this mind is a virtual torture device, keeping us locked within its own limitations. In the absence of practical thought (the only right capacity of the mind), there is always some painful reaction...
What is it that has you feeling trapped? * A failing relationship teetering on the edge of breakup? * A depression that coils itself around your mind the moment you wake up? * The sinking feeling that you're well into your middle-age years and still have little to show for it? * Exasperation over the countless responsibilities that hold you hostage and drive you through your day from...
As we all know, there are trying times when states of discouragement literally dog us -- following us around as if they're waiting for us to fall down, never to rise again. On these days, our own lackluster emotions are hounded by thoughts barking at us that nothing is right with our lives. Sound familiar? On these same days, even our smallest wish to part ways with these painful states gets p...
How many times have you found yourself thinking you'd like to develop a new skill or sharpen an old one? Maybe you've wanted to learn another language or play a musical instrument; further your education; or get up out of your easy chair and do some catch-up on that correspondence you've been putting off for weeks! But in each, or at least most, of these instances, before you can even get sta...
iving within us dwells an order of being that knows, without thinking about it, what is authentically good for us and others.
The realization that there are parts of us that are against us can hit us with a jolt. But when we see that these wrong parts have actually created the pains that they then falsely promise to free us of, we eagerly seek -- and find -- the real Friend who will bring all pains to an end.
Freedom, real freedom, does exist. But it is not a condition of events, nor is it found within another person's approval of us. Neither is real freedom ever a mere effect of circumstances, otherwise it is not freedom but merely a temporary pleasure we have mistaken for being the same as being free...
It's safe to say that most us wrestle with some kind of frustration on a daily basis. This kind of dissatisfaction can be with ourselves, over what we can or can't get done -- or with others, who may deny us our wish or otherwise disappoint our expectations. Accordingly, we can feel as though we are blocked, incapable, unable, not strong or wise enough to move ahead as we would.