Here is a life-saving fact, so welcome the healing it brings by being willing to see the truth hidden within it: There lives nothing real in our past — regardless of how disappointing or painful it may have been — that can grab us and make us its captive, anymore than dark shadows have the power to keep us from walking into the sunlight. Now, add to this fact the realization that there is never a good reason to go along with feeling bad about yourself, and you’re on your way to living in a world without self-pity. Call upon the following special self-study guides as needed. Use them to help strengthen your wish to be free of all dark self-compromising states.

1. The only thing feeling sorry for yourself changes about your life is that it makes it worse.

2. No matter how you look at it, you involve yourself with whatever you resist!

3. Being wrapped up in self-pity completely spoils any chance of being able to see new possibilities as they appear; besides, no one likes sour milk!

4. The only thing that grows from cultivating any dark seed of sorrow is more bitter fruit.

5. Feeling sorry for those who want you to feel sorry for them is like giving an alcoholic a gift certificate to a liquor store.

6. Anytime you embrace a dark inner state, you increase the size of its stake on your heart and mind.

7. Feeling sorry for yourself is a slow acting poison; it first corrupts, and then consumes the heart…choking it with dark and useless emotions.

8. You cannot separate the reasons you have for feeling sorry for yourself from the sorry way you feel.

9. The heart watered by tears of self-pity soon turns to stone; it is incapable of compassion.

10. Agreeing to live with sad regrets only ensures they’ll still be with you tomorrow.