The next time you feel yourself starting to become frustrated, angry or scared, do your best to confirm this vital insight: Negative emotions cannot exist without having something to blame for their punishing presence.

The clearer for yourself you can make this spiritual fact — about the dualistic nature of spiritual weakness — the better prepared you’ll be to take your next step toward higher spiritual strength. Your discovery leads you to this totally new action. Whatever it takes, don’t express that surfacing irritation by naming or blaming anything outside of you as being its cause.

Even if you have to remove yourself physically from the developing situation, then do it. Find some way to temporarily isolate yourself — along with your smoldering emotional state. Please note: Isolate yourself along with your agitation.

If it helps to make what appears to be a bitter pill taste better, think of these inner-trials as the pause that spiritually strengthens, for a new strength is exactly what you’ll win for yourself each time you elect to work with this step.

Voluntarily isolating yourself along with your irritated thoughts and feelings doesn’t mean cutting them off; nor does it mean that you should pretend that you’re not on fire. Suppression of these weak inner states is just the opposite of angrily expressing them, and every bit as harmful. Don’t express — or suppress — any negative state. Besides, either one of these opposite approaches always produces the same results; nothing changes except for what’s being blamed. Choosing to not blame lifts you above both of these losing choices.

Your conscious non-action turns you into the objective witness of what are your own superheated emotions. And from the safety of this higher awareness you see about yourself what you couldn’t see before because of all the inner fire and smoke. Your discoveries empower you to cancel the real cause of your inner combustibility. Not only is your self-command restored, but it’s heightened. Each discovery of an unseen weakness heralds the coming of a greater spiritual strength.