Inner Life

Only we can awaken our selves. That takes hard, hard work. Any one who tells us otherwise is lying.

Part of our mythological clash is about how we choose to exercise human consciousness. There are myriad ways in which modern societies limit consciousness and keep humanity distracted from their inner lives.

Learning to embrace impermanence is the portal to discovering your true self and letting it emerge from beneath all you've learned to believe about who you are.

Faith in a balanced form could be a positive, and in some ways essential, trait for humanity. However, it could also have the potential for becoming counterproductive if it is used as blind faith or ignorance.

Without the material playground, the spirit becomes ephemeral to us; unable to manifest tangibly within our everyday lives. So the life of the spirit needs to become very real for us, and well-lived.

Meditation is just about stopping and being with whatever arises, whether good or not so good. It is about freedom in this very moment!

This is not a mental process but an experiential one as meditation is an opening, a release of ego identity when all attempts to meditate, all striving, all doing stops

Change happens in the flash of a moment but the ego mind -- our self-obsessiveness -- needs to make everything appear solid and permanent.

Both of these exercises can be used any time you feel the need to shine more light into your life and dispel the darkness -- or when you would simply like a quick energetic lift.

There is actually no part of our being that is a separate or independent entity from everyone we have met and everything we have done or from every part of the world around us.

For compassion to be effective, we need to discover if our actions are going to be of real help and value or if they may actually be supporting an already unhealthy situation.

If you are following any kind of religious or spiritual path, then telling the truth is usually up there with other ethical obligations. But is speaking the truth always the best thing to do?

Through meditation we can become aware of mind games and go beyond the fixation of "all about me" to see the wisdom-mind that is radiant, altruistic and free.

Meditation puts on the light in an otherwise dark room. It enables us to see through illusions and relax into our true nature.

Consider this: It may be psychologically healthier to end your marriage. Engaging in two different kinds of marriages may be a better response to the emotional and sexual realities of our fluid, interconnected world.

If you are not creating what you want from your life, either in your well-being, relationships, wallet or area of contribution, check where you've placed your net. That is, reconsider where you are operating from self-limiting beliefs.

This may sound farfetched but meditation is a direct way to cut through the chaotic monkey mind constantly making excuses and supporting our neurosis. It's that fundamental. Yet so many people pay it so little attention.

To meet the challenges of our "Sputnik moment," we need to revamp our thinking about what success is, as well as what psychological orientation is necessary to achieve it.

It's important that we acknowledge what we are feeling -- all the anger, unfairness, and aversion -- and really honor how hurt we are.

How different our world would be if we were all just a bit more compassionate and kind! So what is it that prevents us? Kindness is free, it never goes bad, it has no sell-by date, we can never get enough of it, and we can never give enough of it.

If we want to be happy then why do we suffer? In one of our workshops we asked the participants to raise their hands if they wanted to suffer. No one did. So why do we?

A new year has a very special effect: it makes us feel we have the chance to start over, to do things right this time, to make amends, to become the person we really know we can be.

Whether Santa is real or not really doesn't matter, as he has been endowed with some remarkable qualities that we can all learn from.