I have a friend who’s an avid gardener, and she has fun doing things many people would find unpleasant or even disgusting.  One example that stands out for me is that she enjoys removing snails from her flowers and vegetables by hand.  True, she’s wearing gloves when she does it, but still I think a [...]

Much of today’s personal development literature is about how the type of thoughts you think influence your reality.  Some authors focus on how what you think about tends to appear in the world.  For example, in their view, if you constantly visualize a beautiful house, you’re likely to eventually live in one, and if you’re [...]

I used to be what many people call an “introvert.”  I usually preferred being alone to being in social situations.  When I did socialize, I’d enjoy myself for a little while, but I’d start getting tired quickly.  Interacting with people seemed like hard work—doing it felt more like meeting an obligation than hanging out and [...]

The most effective inner work I’ve done on myself has been in the form of what’s often called “conscious suffering.”  This term comes from early twentieth-century mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, who “distinguished between unconscious suffering, which is without value, and conscious suffering, sometimes termed ‘voluntary’ or ‘deliberate’ suffering, through which we can self-perfect.”
By this, I mean [...]

I watched with great interest Eckhart Tolle’s webcast with Oprah Winfrey on Monday this week.  I’ve been inspired by his spiritual teachings for a long time, and I was pleased to see that he now has such a powerful vehicle to convey his message to the world.  Interestingly, I learned the most not from the [...]

I used to be very unhappy with the way I thought about myself.  I was particularly dissatisfied with the egotistical thoughts I had.  Thoughts would come up like “I’m going to be mega-famous and fill 30,000-seat arenas,” “everyone is going to see me as their spiritual guru,” “I’m a figure of historical importance,” and so [...]