Your life changes forever as soon as you accept that you are 100% responsible for a relationship to your own experience and specifically to any state of reaction or contraction. Others may push your buttons, waves of feeling may seem to come from nowhere, old patterns of thinking and self-involvement will recur and seem to make you angry or defensive, but how your journey within yourself when this happens is yours and yours alone.

Moment-by-moment, you have the power to receive yourself with love and compassion – including the dark feelings – so that your mind is not in the past or the future, or trapped in stories about yourself or others. Bring yourself gently present in your body. Focus softly on areas of contraction and lovingly practice the art of settling and dissolution. Admire the genius of your ego’s perseverance — how frequently it can take you into the same familiar reactivity — and remember that having an ego, even in its most neurotic moments is a miracle. The path you are on is to respect that miracle, grow to understand how it was assembled, and gradually evolve beyond it into greater awareness.

I hope you will explore this practice and I hope to see you soon because we do need to be decisive about living lives that make a profound difference.

In love and gratitude,

Richard