Today we ask that you stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

Most people feel very sorry for themselves.  If you ask them how they are today, they will tell you why they are sorry for themselves, and in turn expect you to feel sorry for them.  If you do not fulfill this need, you may be accused of being uncaring, unfeeling, or cruel.

Actually, it is not helpful at all to feel sorry for other people.  It is good to give other people permission to feel their feelings, including hurt, sad, or aggrieved feelings.  But you do not do anyone any good by feeling sorry for them.

When you feel sorry for yourself, it energetically affirms to the universe that you believe you are a victim.

When you feel sorry for others, it only energetically affirms their victimhood.

When you energetically affirm something, it tends to increase that particular energy in your experience.  So affirming victimhood increases experiences of victimization.

So if you want to stop feeling like a victim, first you must stop feeling sorry for yourself.  It is not the other way around.  It is not about waiting for fortune to smile on you to give you a reason not to feel sorry for yourself.  If you are someone who habitually feels sorry for yourself, you will always find reasons to feel sorry for yourself.

If you want a friend to stop feeling like a victim, don’t feel sorry for that person.

As awful as your life may seem, someone out there in the world might very well covet it.  That person might say: “I’d give anything to have that person’s life and opportunities!”

It is good to feel your feelings.  This does not mean, suppress your feelings.

It just means, don’t have a story about your victimhood.  Don’t make a big drama over your feelings.  Don’t wallow in feeling sorry for yourself.

Nothing really is more of an energetic turn-off than someone who complains all the time, and wallows in self-pity.  That is not a very juicy person.

So if you desire more juice and abundance in your life, stop feeling sorry for yourself and start appreciating what is good in your existence.

If you actually understood how energetically contracting and stifling the frequency of self-pity is, you’d be less likely to engage in it.  

Feel your feelings.  Take appropriate actions.  But do not feel sorry for yourself, or others.  No one benefits from it.  

Today we ask that you listen to your own truth, and no one else’s.

Sometimes, when you are feeling uncertain about things, it is good to turn to trusted friends, or even reach out to strangers on the internet.  The human collective consciousness can be a valuable resource.

However, often what happens is that you will hear conflicting things from different people, and instead of giving you more clarity, you wind up more confused.  Once you get lost on the internet, searching for advice and reassurance that you are doing the “right thing,” then you are probably far more muddled in your thinking than you were before you started searching.  Conflicting advice breeds paralysis.  

As it is said in regard to opinions: “everybody’s got one.”

Ultimately, you must be able to discern and feel what is best for you.  To do this, you must detach from the external voices, quiet the mind, and look inward.  You must listen to your heart in all matters.

Sometimes your heart will ask you to directly go against the advice you receive from trusted friends and mentors.  This is never easy.  But the truth is, no one else can live your life for you.  What works well for another person, even a trusted friend, might be terrible for you.

Every being is singular, and unique.  There is no “one size fits all” approach.

If you feel conflicted in any way, that means it is time to get still with yourself.  Meditate.  Go for a walk.  Relax around the matter.  Focus your energy elsewhere, in an area where you do not feel conflict.  This is the surest way to find an answer.

Follow your heart.  And give yourself permission to “do it wrong,” and to “fail.”  There is no such thing as a mistake, or true failure; only a growth experience.  You dwell in a loving universe, not a punishing one.  Punishment exists within the mind, and is enacted by humans as a result of false belief systems — mainly, the belief in a punishing God or universe.  But the real universe is only loving.  In truth, you cannot do it wrong.  If you really understood that, you would be free.

Listen to others, but always with a grain of salt.  In the end, you must follow your own heart.  

Today we ask that you perceive that prosperity arises in the present moment.

What does this mean?

It simply means that what you are doing, or not doing, right now determines whether you are “prosperous” or not.

Prosperity does not necessarily mean monetary wealth.  It is very possible to possess money and not be prosperous.

Prosperity is a quality of thriving.  You are thriving in the physical world.  There is a sense of abundance, of bountiful life.  Your cup runneth over.

It is possible to thrive as a beggar.  But a pinched, miserly person cannot thrive no matter what he possesses, as the mythic tale of Scrooge indicates.  Scrooge is prosperous only when he becomes generous and loving, at the end of the story.

Many people believe that their prosperity will arise in the future.  They plan their whole lives believing that they will someday reap a future reward.

As part of this, such people often believe that a life of misery and toil in the present moment is the price one must pay for this prosperous future.

This is a great lie.

If you are miserable now, that is the only reality that exists for you.  You could die suddenly; many people do.  Or you will discover, as many do, that you are no happier in the future than you are now.

Miserable people stay miserable, no matter what their external circumstances.  People who constantly suffer, complain, and perceive only lack in their lives will keep suffering and complaining and perceiving lack.  Why would this be any different in their “retirement”?

The point is, there is no golden future, where all your toil and misery “pays off.”  Even if you achieve your goals, the misery will remain.  

Your prosperity can only exist in the present moment.  If it does not exist here, it is nowhere.  

You can only thrive right now, in the present moment.

If you wish to thrive, you must thrive on what is yours right now.  You must thrive with the life that is given you.

So ask: how am I rich, right now?

You may protest: “But I’m not rich!”

Still, ask yourself: How am I rich right now?”

Take an inventory of the good things in your life experience.  They may seem small and insignificant.  But consider what you have, that is good.  

This action is the only way to become a truly prosperous person.

If you yearn for prosperity, find it here, now.  It is nowhere else.

Do not live for some future that will never arrive.

Do you think any human in history ever had a life unfold exactly as planned?

This has not happened even once, out of all the billions who have lived.

So to think you can plan and manage and control your future is utterly delusional.  No one can do this.  Anyone who sells this illusion is a liar, a con artist, or delusional himself.  

If you want to be prosperous, start here.  Start now.

Count your blessings.  And keep counting them.

That is the only way to thrive in this world.  There is no other.

Today we ask that you look at the ways in which you try to assert control over reality.

It could be said that most human activity boils down to “trying to assert control over reality.”

You try to assert control over your environment, other people, your own body, and reality itself.

The results are, at best, a mixed bag.  Humans experience terrible misery and frustration when they feel they are not in control — and they feel that way most of the time.  It is also a cause of much human violence, directed inwardly at the self, and outwardly at other people and the environment.  

Like children, many so-called adults resort to screaming, bullying, and hitting when they do not get their way.  This is how wars begin.  Always from the feeling of a loss of control.

In order to evolve beyond this undeveloped state of screaming, hitting, and throwing tantrums in order to assert control, humans must learn a subtler way of interacting with reality.

Of course it is natural for humans to interact with their environment and others — creating, building and inventing structures and relationships.  This can be defined not as controlling reality, but rather as being as play in reality.

A child at play is creatively expressing himself, and usually having a very good time.  A child asserting control by throwing a tantrum is experiencing a great deal of suffering, often over nothing important. 

It is natural for children to throw tantrums.  But so-called adults throw tantrums all the time.  They may not do it externally.  Most adult tantrums happen internally, as the mind destructively turns against itself.  There is a lot of screaming, bullying, and hitting that goes in people’s heads.

People believe that all this screaming and bullying actually has the effect of giving them the control they seek.  But it’s always a temporary fix at best.  As soon as the illusion of control is lost — and it always is — it’s time for another tantrum.  This is an exhausting way to live, and a cause of suffering and disease.

The great leap for humans is learning to feel at ease with the sense of “not being in control.”  It is learning to relax in the face of this feeling, and not tense up.  

This requires the cultivation of a deep trust and faith in the intrinsic underlying goodness of reality.  It is cultivating the belief that reality is for you, not against you.  

And if you playfully create in partnership with reality, instead of trying to beat it into submission, not only will you enjoy life more, but your whole life experience may drastically change.

The first step is just examining the urge to assert control as it arises.  Look at the ways you physically tense up and throw tantrums when you experience the loss of control — even if the tantrum is suppressed inside your own mind.  

This is where you have the opportunity to learn how to intelligently change your habituated “tantrum” pattern.  At the very moment you start to “scream, bully, or hit” when you feel a loss of control — again, even if this is purely internal — you may learn to introduce a “good parent” into your consciousness.  This “good parent” allows a healthy release of emotion, followed by relaxation and letting go — instead of tensing, gripping, forcing, and becoming violent in one’s thoughts or actions.  

Really, in this reality, you are like a child, playing with blocks.  Your “block buildings” are your creations.  

Sometimes a wind comes along and blows down your blocks.  Sometimes a bully comes along and knocks down your blocks.  It’s not personal.  It happens to everyone.

It is okay to feel emotional when your blocks are knocked down.  You have permission to feel a sense of grief or loss or anger when your blocks are knocked down.

The key is what happens next.  Do the emotions ramp up into a big tantrum?  Do you lash out at yourself, others, or reality?  Do you attack and blame, grip and force?  

Or can you be a good parent to yourself, encouraging the healthy release of the emotional energy.  Can you learn to relax, let go — and not exhaust yourself or hurt anyone else with a tantrum.

Ideally, you release the emotion, and return to the block-building, without screaming or hitting yourself or other people because you have discovered you are not in control of reality.  Okay, your blocks have toppled.  It’s time to create something else, something new.  

Learning meditative practices that help one to calm the mind at will is immeasurably useful in this regard.

You are here to play, to create.  And no, you are not in control.  You are a part of something much bigger than your little personality.  That is why your efforts to control reality and get it to do exactly what you want are always doomed to fail, in the long run.

When you understand this, and learn to relax in those “out of control” moments — then life really begins to get juicy, and fun.  

Today we ask that you connect with the juiciness of life

For life is juicy.  Even in the driest desert, if you slice open a cactus, you will find it is full of juice.

Only dead things are dry.  Life is, by definition, juicy.

Yet humans have been taught to fear and judge the juiciness of life.

Many religions equate “juiciness” with “sin.”

Saints, martyrs — such people are not usually associated with “juiciness.”  There is a decidedly dry quality to the collective image of “holy people.”

Eroticism is a deeply important dimension of human existence.  It is in many ways impossible to truly experience the juiciness of life if one is cut off from the pleasures of physical embodiment.

Such energy is not limited to the sexual act — which, sadly, for many people is not particularly juicy.  It is more a way of walking in the world, of feeling an erotic charge around tasting a fresh orange, or taking a hot shower.  Feeling good in your physical body is “juicy.”

Even if one is contemplating the beauty of art, or divinity, it is not good to live too much in your head, to exist from the neck up.  To be purely “cerebral” is to be cut off from the juiciness of life.

Many people who experience abundance problems really just need an infusion of “juice.”

Many health problems arise because of a lack of “juice.”  Dryness creates inflammation, and causes all manner of disease.

Most cultures condition people to believe that to be a good, virtuous person, you must suffer and be miserable.  This belief system does nothing but create a dry, joyless, juice-less existence.

So today, look at ways to connect with the juiciness of life.

Connect with ways to experience joy and pleasure in the physical world.

Get out of your head.  Connect with the “waist down” part of yourself.

Eat something delicious, and really be present with it.  It doesn’t have to be a gourmet meal.  Eating an apple can be a deeply erotic experience in the right frame of mind.

When you take a shower or bathe, connect with the deep pleasure of the experience of being in the water, and touching your body.

Notice if you feel resistance around this, or start to “check out.”  Do you go back into your head, your thoughts, your lists of things to do?  Do you feel guilty or ashamed?  Pay attention to resistance you feel toward life’s juiciness.

How can your life get juicier?

The juicier you are, the healthier you are.

Think of a plant.  A juicy plant is healthy.  A dry plant is sick.

Many problems can dissolve simply by connecting to the juiciness of life.

Today we ask that you look at the people who most upset you.

Who triggers you?  Who pushes your buttons?

It does not have to be someone you know personally.  Maybe it is a politician, or a criminal.

But this person arouses deep feelings of resentment, contempt, disgust, and even hatred.

Perhaps you consider yourself so enlightened that you do not feel this way about anyone.  But most likely someone out there triggers you.  Imagine someone who appears to be totally irredeemable, like Adolph Hitler.

It may also be someone very close to you, like a parent or family member or ex.

Who do you resent?  Who triggers you?

Bring this person to mind.

It is okay to feel the feelings that arise when you think of this person.  Really give yourself the space to feel those feelings.  

It is natural to recoil from someone whose energy feels threatening, or malignant.  It is your body’s defense mechanism to feel an aversion or disgust.  You feel an aversion to sticking your finger in a live electrical socket.  You feel disgust around rotten food.  This is not “made up.”  It your body’s way or protecting you from harm.

Unfortunately, when it comes to people, the mind can be conditioned to feel aversion and disgust for individuals who do not pose a real threat.  Such is the basis for racism, discrimination, and all manner of abuse, slavery, and genocide.

So it is important, with people, to discern whether or not they pose a real, immediate threat to one’s safety, or merely an imagined threat.

Some individuals are violent, insane, abusive, and destructive, it is true.  Adolph Hitler was such a person.  

However, the people Hitler despised, for whom he felt genocidal hatred, were not a real threat.  They were an imagined threat.  

Sometimes we believe stories about the people we despise, that are not absolutely true.  There may be some basis to the belief.  But usually such stories are based on limited information, misinformation, and misunderstanding.  Hatred arises out of ignorance.

Again, this is not about condoning destructive behavior.

The key is to watch the ways in which one judges or dehumanizes those who arouse disgust, and resentment.

For this is a slippery slope.  To hate someone who holds different political or religious beliefs, even if those beliefs are ignorant and destructive, is in a very real sense showing that you are fundamentally the same as the person you are harshly judging.  

Often people believe that it is up to them to punish wrongdoers, and to uphold justice in the world.

Most of the time, this is a misuse of energy.  Most of the time, it causes far more harm than good.

Yes, the violent and insane should be prevented from causing harm.

But it is important to discern the reality of the threat someone poses.  Most criminal justice systems cause far more harm than good, both by exposing people who are basically harmless to punitive measures, and by punishing the insane and ignorant in ways that only reinforce their violent tendencies.

Can you cultivate a compassionate heart for the people who trigger your loathing and disgust?

Even if you have every reason to hate them, even if they have directly harmed you in the past, can you still perceive their basic humanity?

Many humans are simply insane.  But insanity is rightly perceived as an illness, not a moral failing.

If you were born, say, in the pre-Civil War American South, and your parents owned slaves, most likely you would have believed that slavery was just and that black people were more like animals than humans.  

This was a form of collective insanity.  If you had been conditioned from early childhood to believe such things, you would have been “infected” with this disease.  Beliefs behave exactly like viruses.

There is a vast difference between labeling someone “sick” as opposed to “evil.”

When one views an ignorant, destructive person as “sick,” there is compassion, and a desire for healing.  Precautions must be taken, yes.  But there is no dehumanization, as occurs the moment you judge a person as “evil” or “morally defective.”

Have compassion for the sick.  Behaving abusively and destructively toward the self, or others, is nothing but a sure sign of illness.  

Take precautions around a sick person.  If you know someone behaves destructively and abusively, do not believe the things they say.  Do not subscribe to the false beliefs that cause destructive and abusive behavior.  Do not absorb false belief viruses.  Do not catch their illness.

But it is not your place to condemn them.

Here is something to understand:

Whatever you stand in opposition to, energetically is linked to you.

The stronger the opposition, the stronger the link.

If you do not like a certain energy in your life, then the last thing you want to do is hate and oppose it.

Why?  Because when you let go of your opposition to what you dislike, you will actually experience less of what you dislike.  

Your hatred and opposition is actually keeping that unpleasant energy stuck in your life.  

That is why it can be argued that cultivating compassion for the people you dislike is purely selfish.  It actually releases you from your energetic bondage to those people.

Today we ask that you connect with a loving personal “god.”

What does this mean?

Prior to the rise of the world’s current major religions, all cultures were polytheistic, worshipping a wide variety of local gods.  There were gods of the home, gods of the forests and fields and lakes and mountains.  Everything in the world was alive with these little “gods.”

There was a certain value to this worldview.  It imbued all things with sacredness and life force.  One honors nature because it is alive with sacredness, and people know better than to dishonor their “gods.”

Of course, people were superstitious about their little gods.  But people are no less superstitious about the big “God” of western religion.  All religions can be rife with superstition.  Superstition is the fear that if you displease or offend a “god,” bad things will happen to you.  Superstition is quite harmful.

And yet there is a value to honoring the sacredness of things, and connecting to gods who feel very familiar, very personal, and very loving.

Maybe for you the personal god is Jesus, or a saint, or Ganesh, or the Buddha, or Luke Skywalker, or Superman.  Maybe it is a deceased relative.  Maybe it is a fictional character.  Maybe it is a deceased person who is not related to you, who you feel a connection to.  Maybe it is the presiding spirit of a natural place that is dear to you.  

It really does not matter who it is, so long as you feel a personal connection, and the feelings around this being are purely loving.  

This is very important.  You must not “fear” this god in any way.  There should be no negative charge whatsoever around this being.  The feeling tone around the personal god must be purely loving, purely positive.

You can even make up a personal god for yourself, like a child with an imaginary friend.  You can create a god who has qualities that for you are purely positive.

Why should you do such a thing?

Because connecting with a loving personal god connects you with the divine, mythic dimension of existence, the sacredness that underlies all things.  It can also create a feeling of empowerment, a feeling of being loved and cared for by the universe, that is very essential for an abundant life.

You certainly do not have to do such a thing.  And if you do, it should be done with a very playful spirit.  Do not take it too seriously.  

It might be fun to try.  To make up a god, or connect with some being from “real life” or “fiction” who is meaningful to you, or with a saint or god of antiquity who feels purely loving to you.  It is a child-like thing to do, and it is good to be child-like, to see the world as vibrant and magical.  

If you feel like you could use a little magic in your life, connecting with a loving personal god is always helpful — so long as it is done with a playful heart, and you do not take it too seriously.  

Today we ask that you examine the relationship between judging, complaining, and victimhood.

These things are directly connected.

To the degree that you are someone who often sits in judgment over yourself and others, to the degree that you habitually complain, so shall you feel like a victim.

The reason for this is not a mystery.

When you sit in judgment over yourself or someone else, and especially when you complain, doesn’t this affirm your victimhood?

So-and-so has offended you.  You feel like a victim.

The government is bad.  You feel like a victim.

You are not good enough.  You are a victim of your own imperfection.

Life is not good enough.  You are a victim of God.

Do you want to know how to stop feeling like a victim?

It is very simple.  Stop judging.   Stop complaining.

This does not mean, suppress your emotions.  This does not mean, do not take positive action in the world.

It just means that if you are someone who feels like a victim in life, and you do not like that feeling, then the single most effective action you can take is to break habitual judgment of the self and others, and stop complaining.

For some, “Stop complaining” may sound like “Stop breathing.”

And yet it is very possible to stop complaining.  

Why not try it?  Can you imagine going a day, or even a week, without complaining about other people and life?  

Can you see that nothing bad will happen if you do this?  Can you see that judging/complaining is a habit, not a necessity?

Another way to decrease the energy of judgment/victimhood in your life is to increase the energy of appreciation.

Appreciate other people.  Appreciate yourself.  Appreciate the beauty around you.

Someone who is in a state of appreciation does not and cannot feel like a victim — not in that moment.

So if you do not like feeling like a victim, decrease the energy of judgment and complaint, and increase the energy of appreciation.

This simple recipe can completely transform the experience of life.

Today we ask that you examine your stress response.

Are you someone who gets very worked up over things?  Or are you someone who stays calm?

One is not superior to the other.  In fact, the calm person may be suppressing emotion in an unhealthy way.

The key to a healthy stress response is as follows:

Give yourself permission to feel the feeling.  Anxiety, frustration, anger, helplessness — whatever comes up for you.  Give yourself permission to feel the feeling.

Then ask: “How can I feel better?”

You do not need to answer this question.  Just keep asking it.

So there are two steps.

First, you give yourself permission to feel the feeling.

Second, you ask: “How can I feel better? or “How can this situation get better?”

If you keep asking, an answer may occur to you.  Or else you will suddenly find that you feel better.

This is a very simple process.  But if you remember to do this when you encounter stressful stimuli, it will cut down significantly on your physical stress response.

The physical stress response is the cause of much mental and physical illness.  It is also the cause of much strife between people.

A healthy stress response is in proportion to what is happening.  If you are in a life or death situation, a strong stress response is useful.

But if you are having an intense stress response from sitting in traffic or reading a text message, then this is harmful.  It is harmful to you, and it is harmful to those around you.

So it is good to develop a practiced response to stress.

When a stressful situation arises, give yourself permission to feel what you are feeling.  And really give yourself time to feel the feeling — do not gloss over this part.  Do not suppress the feeling.  Give yourself permission to feel what you are feeling.

Then ask: “How can I feel better?” or “How can this get better?”

Keep asking until the situation improves.  You will find that it almost always does.  If it does not, let yourself feel the feeling again.  Then simply ask, “How can I feel better?” or “How can this get better?”

Today we ask that you listen to what is inside of you.

The vast majority of humans are outer-directed.  That is to say, their whole perception of reality is shaped by what is external.

They rely on their five senses.  They rely on measurements like money, success, approval.  They listen to what authority figures have to say.  Often they are quite addicted to external stimuli, and have great difficult with stillness, and silence.  That is because their whole sense of self is wrapped up in what is external, and when the external world goes silent they no longer know who they are.  They find this loss of identity extremely uncomfortable, and avoid it at all costs.

Those of you on the spiritual path may already know that the true beginning of the awakening process happens at the moment of sitting still, turning inward, and letting the external world drop away.  It is in the loss of the ego identity that the True Self is discovered.

The awakening process asks you to go inside.  It asks that you place your trust and faith on what is inside, not outside.

This is not the same as being an “introvert” or an “extrovert.”  It is true that a person who is comfortable with solitude and quiet may be more drawn to this process than someone who thrives on constant stimulation and socializing.  But it is very possible to be an active, social person and also be inner-directed in your orientation.

Being inner-directed asks that you trust a deeper wisdom that exists within you.  It is a quiet voice inside, which is why it is necessary to learn how to quiet the mind in order to access it.  This inner wisdom is available to everyone, everywhere, at all times.  But you must learn how to go inside.

For many people, the practice of meditation is the step that helps them become more inner-directed.  You silence the external world for a brief span of time, and sit with what is inside.

When this becomes a daily practice, new senses begin to bloom within you.  Senses that are not rooted in the external world and its measurements.  You begin to follow an internal compass, one that unerringly points to the North Star of your True Self, your Higher Self.

When one speaks of an “enlightened” person, really this is a description of a person who has become entirely inner-directed.  He still perceives the external world, but he no longer believes in it the way most people do.

Many people wish to change their lives, but they go about it in the wrong way.  They try to change their lives from the outside in.  They try to fix perceived problems in their external reality.

True change cannot happen from the outside in.  One merely exchanges one set of problems for another set of problems.  Peace will never be found this way.

True change can only happen from the inside out.

If you wish to transform your life, go inward.  Go into the silence, the stillness.  Listen to what is there.