You may, at any moment that you wish, become aware of yourself sufficiently enough to know where you are inwardly. When you find yourself living a resentment over again, all you have to do is see that you’re surrounded by thoughts and feelings that were produced by your resistance to a remembered event. That’s all you have to do. Who made you remember what you now wish hadn’t happened to you? Who made you picture the person you resent? Who brought up the failure from your past? Who did any of that in the moment you’re sitting by yourself, or driving in your car, or eating your croissant? 

The answer is something inside of you that is always trying to drag you into a place where it assumes power over you. That’s who! And it’s not a who, it’s a what. It’s not a you. Don’t judge yourself! Don’t condemn yourself for these parts that belong to an aspect of a still unconscious nature. Your aim is to make it conscious; to bring this light into yourself so thoroughly that what now acts upon you will be unable to produce the punishment it does because it gets you into the world where nothing good can happen because you have gone into the wrong place.

Just don’t go there. Can you remember that? 

The problem is, when we get into pain, our pain immediately gives us the reasons why we’re there. The reasons for being in pain are the wrong place to be. Thinking about our reasons for why we’re unhappy is the wrong place to be. It’s part of our unhappiness; it’s not the solution to it. 

We have the capacity to stop making ourselves powerless by waking up to having put ourselves where our powers are stolen from us. We each have ample opportunities every day to come wide-awake, fully back to ourselves, realize we’re being dragged down, and say: “Hold on a moment. This isn’t a good place for me to be.” Then, we can step out of that world of time, which is what thought is. We can step out of that world of tribulation, into the now, because the presence moment is the essence of all that makes a human being whole, healthy, and happy. It is where love exists, and where fear cannot dwell.