Insight Timer Talks

Look closely at what a person struggles with in life; the actual nature of what he or she is fighting to possess, protect, or win; to what does he give his time, most of his attention? To what end her plans, the things she pursues and puts first each day? Such is the only real way to measure the true nature of anyone's character, including our own.

Learn to answer the true need of the moment by attending only to what it asks of you -- and, inseparable from this new intention, to drop any troubled question posed by a disquieted mind that can't see, let alone realize, how it disturbs itself seeking relief from its own unrest!

When we rest in patience, life never fails to reveal the silent wholeness of its celestial design. But without it, we are condemned to a fruitless labor: defending not only the painful illusion that our imagined life is meant to continue uninterrupted, but also that everyone and everything in it exists solely to ensure that nothing disturbs -- let alone challenges -- what we've imagined life to be.

The real cause of any fear, anxiety, or dark emotion isn't because of some unwanted condition that appears before our eyes -- it hides behind them. These dark, seemingly animated shadows are temporary creations; they are cast by a false light of some imagined, brighter time to come that -- even as we identify with it -- causes us to fear it may not come to pass.

The reasons we give ourselves for our pain are not the cause of it.

The end of suffering is not found in the pursuit of freedom from suffering, but in seeing through the very nature of desire that generates the suffering to begin with. The problem is not what we desire, but the identification with desire itself, and the endless cycle of division it creates.

All forms of useless suffering are created in a vain attempt to either acquire what we imagine will make us feel complete, or in the equally vain attempt to escape or otherwise control what we perceive is making us feel incomplete, or somehow inadequate.

The possibility of realizing our highest Good is hidden in every unwanted moment of life where -- if we wish to realize the grace that awaits us there -- we are asked for what amounts to an act of Divine obedience: and that is to yield ourselves to whatever we're given to see as true (about us)... without resisting the nature of what we're being shown, let alone to ask the question "why?"

It is impossible to let go of any painful thought or troubling feeling until we see the parts of us that are secretly clinging to it.

The best possible response to any given moment should be as new (to us) as is the appearance of that new moment itself.

We are meant to live where no one else has ever been, forever stepping into a world that is being made new with every step we take into it.

It's a great mistake to believe that negative imagination needs our involvement to trap us in fearful, conflicted, or otherwise angry states of self. The truth is just the opposite: our most familiar -- and often dominant -- sense of 'I' is shaped by the recurrence of these negative states; where our unconscious identification with this dark inner machinery is, in fact, the real source of our sense of captivity.