It is our own narrow mind, with its narrow view of life, that pressurizes our events and their moments. This small mind, which can’t be separated from the narrow world it perceives, tends to see life’s events not as they are, but as what they are not according to its own unconscious demands.

In other words, the punishing pressure we feel in this life is not because of what life is but because of what we perceive life isn’t — a judgment that could neither be reached nor sustained were it not for there being within us an unseen “board of governors” that had already concluded what “best” serves us and what won’t. But see the contradiction in this discovery and you will free yourself of the pressure created in its undetected presence.

Whenever you “serve” this painful pressure within you, to somehow release yourself from it by doing the dance it prescribes, it is not your interests you serve, but the hidden interests of some small self — the one that has been “telling” you all along what your real pleasures are by punishing you when they seem out of reach!

The next time some pressure starts to build within you, learn to use it to shake yourself awake. Rouse yourself to the pure fact that whatever stress you are starting to feel doesn’t really belong to you. Stand back from yourself long enough to see that pressurized thoughts and feelings can only arise from a narrow view of life that belongs to a narrow self — a false self that you had momentarily and mistakenly taken as your own. Then just quietly drop this formerly unconscious conclusion. This same moment of letting go releases you from this restricted sense of self and the narrow life it creates.