The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace — a gift of God, a message from the unconscious.

Consciousness and Healing To proceed very far through the desert, you must be willing to meet existential suffering and work it through. In order to do this, the attitude toward pain has to change. This happens when we accept the fact that everything that happens to us has been designed for our spiritual growth.

The feeling of being valuable - 'I am a valuable person'- is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline.

The problem of unmet expectations in marriage is primarily a problem of stereotyping. Each and every human being on this planet is a unique person. Since marriage is inevitably a relationship between two unique people, no one marriage is going to be exactly like any other. Yet we tend to wed with explicit visions of what a “good” marriage ought to be like. Then we suffer enormously from trying to force the relationship to fit the stereotype and from the neurotic guilt and anger we experience when we fail to pull it off.

All my life I used to wonder what I would become when I grew up. Then, about seven years ago, I realized that I was never going to grow up--that growing is an ever ongoing process.

When we teach ourselves and our children discipline, we are teaching them and ourselves how to suffer and also how to grow.

Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.