We tend to run from difficult people and difficult situations. If we repeatedly find ourselves in such situations, we determine that we must be masochistic and enjoy playing the role of a victim.

There is an entirely different possibility. It’s that difficult situations and difficult people come into our life for a purpose. If we ask what, in us, they are trying to show us, they have transformative power.

“Each difficult moment has the potential to open my eyes and open my heart,” said the writer Myla Kabat-Zinn.

A potential—not a certainty. It depends on how we respond. Most tend not to have their eyes and heart opened by difficulties because they see themselves as victims.

If a difficult moment is going to open our eyes and heart, it’s crucial to keep our focus internal—on ourselves and how we are reacting to the situation or person—not on the external circumstances.

If we put the focus on the person or situation that seems to be the cause of our grief, we strengthen our belief that something is going wrong in our life—that what is happening shouldn’t be happening the way it is. We make ourselves a victim.

One of the tricks of our ego is to tell ourselves we draw to ourselves people and situations that victimize us because there’s something wrong with us.

The opposite is true. Such people come into our life to awaken us to what’s right with us.

To have our eyes and heart opened to the unconditionally loving person we really are, who because of unconditional love can’t even see another human being in the category of a victimizer, is challenging and can even be quite painful. It reverses the way we normally look at things.

It means we have to face the only real victimizer—the self-crucifier in our own head, which takes in any external situation and uses it to form nails and a crown of thorns.

If we look closely at our life—not with the eyes of the intellect, which analyzes, but with the eyes of the heart, which perceives—we will realize that all our life long we have faced the same issue that we face today.

There has always been someone in our life who played the victimizing role we tell ourselves someone is playing at present.

In the past, the cast on stage looked different, even acting out a quite different play. But the situation was nevertheless repeating exactly the issue that’s before us at this moment.

In the victimology model that has guided so much of modern therapy and spirituality, we are told that this phenomenon arises because we are dysfunctional, courtesy of our family of origin, and we need to recognize our tendency to draw to ourselves such abusive, victimizing people and get far away from them.

Seen not through analyzing, but through the eyes of the heart, something different is being asked of us. We are asked to see what’s happening not as evidence of dysfunction, but as the unconditional love of infinite Presence, reaching out to us repeatedly by sending just such situations and people into our life, awakening us to our own capacity for unconditional love.

When love is truly unconditional, it recognizes that nothing at all is going wrong. In fact, things are going just as they need to—and if we run from the situation, we are going to see it repeat itself because the divine love never gives up on us.

What we have named victimization is really the divine love seeking to awaken us to our own loving center. That’s what the Buddha realized—and it’s what the entire episode of the crucifixion of Jesus teaches.

We’ll pick up this theme again tomorrow, looking at what, in practical terms, love would have us do in the face of a situation that awakens our tendency for self-crucifixion.

Said personal coach Jim Warner, “Solitude is often the hardest discipline, because none of us want to be with someone we don’t love, namely ourselves.”

All the praise in the world can’t instill a love of ourselves. No one telling us how lovable we are makes a dime of difference after a few days—often after a few minutes!

We go to workshop after workshop, retreat after retreat, that tells us how lovable we are, but none of it lasts into everyday life.

The effect of being bolstered by another person is fleeting, and we are then right back to the self-doubting and self-apology that has dogged our steps so very long.

If telling us to love ourselves doesn’t cut it, neither does telling ourselves that we should love ourselves. We come to the experience of self-love not by telling ourselves something, but by experiencing our own loving essence firsthand.

Self-love isn’t something we can think ourselves into. It can’t be brought about through any kind of advice or mental gymnastics. There are no tools or tricks to accomplish self-love. All the techniques we try fall flat on their face the moment we are challenged by a situation that again causes us to doubt ourselves or see ourselves as a victim.

Self-love must emerge within us in a highly personal way, not as a self-concept. It’s an experience, not a concept. Only in this manner can it become a living experience that happens from day to day spontaneously, and not something we have to seek for or talk ourselves into.

It’s so natural for us to want someone else to validate us, put a check next to our decisions, assure us we are on the right path.

The reality is, when we still need the advice, guidance, or validation of anyone else, it’s evidence we are not yet enveloped in self-love.

The person who is really in touch with their essence, and not just with a mental concept of their essence, is guided internally by their own loving being, which requires no validation from anyone.

The self-loving person is self-validating. They live from inner knowing, which often contradicts even the very “best” advice from teachers, counselors, and those we imagine to be spiritual “guides.”

Self-love is something we live our way into.

Life shows how much it loves us because it sends us just the situations we need to accomplish this—although we tell ourselves that in order to love ourselves, we must run from the very situations life tailors for us.

But that’s all right too. Life will simply send us the same situation in a different disguise, because it never gives up on loving us. It’s life’s nature to be unconditionally loving.

In order to love ourselves, there’s nothing we need to acquire. We don’t have to get love, only to awaken to ourselves as the self-loving individuals we already are but have lost touch with.

Something has to draw out our love. If we are just among people who are nice all the time, and in pleasant situations, this doesn’t happen. We float through life oblivious to the power of our love because it’s never called into action.

It’s the person who sticks in our craw that’s life gift to us.

The self-loving person doesn’t run from perfectly tailored situations that can draw out their love because it never sees themselves as being abused or victimized. As long as we entertain such feelings about what’s happening to us, we haven’t yet awakened to our own self-love.

The person who hasn’t opened their eyes on their own loving self will tend to feel that someone else is abusing or victimizing them. But in a clever ploy of the ego, they know better than to blame the other, so they tell themselves that their problem is that they attract abusive people. Self-love then seems to be to avoid such people.

The self-loving person doesn’t attract abusive people, and in fact has no category of “abusive” in which to place another person because the power of their self-love is so great that it’s not possible to abuse or victimize them. This is what “unconditional” means when we speak of love as unconditional.

If a situation arises in which someone doesn’t care to invest their time in a particular activity or person because it’s no longer their calling to do so, they separate from it as naturally as oil and water. There is no emotional wash—no emotional charge—to the separation. It happens naturally, spontaneously, organically.

We can tell when something is happening naturally because there’s no drama—no sense of “this person is toxic, this situation abusive, so I’ve got to get away from it.”

We don’t even have to think about it or decide anything. There’s no decision to make because decisions make themselves for the self-loving person. A quiet knowing is present. Self-love simply can’t be touched by abuse, and it calmly and peacefully moves us where we need to be without trauma or drama.

In other words, the self-loving person is untouched by anything external. This is true detachment, as the Buddha showed. Jesus also manifested this non-attachment as he was crucified. Not an ounce of energy went into seeing the situation as abusive. On the contrary, nothing but love poured from him toward those who crucified him. We see the same in Gandhi toward the various factions that wanted to kill him.

The self-loving person has no need to defend themselves. In any situation, nothing but love comes from them. They can even be extremely close to their family of origin when it’s terribly dysfunctional, with no need to remove themselves, because of the high level of detachment they experience emotionally—a detachment made possible by their immense love. They no longer see their family as abusive. They don’t know what abuse is, even—they have no category for it.

This is what unconditional love is like. It never sees anyone in a light other than divine.

We’ll pick this theme up again tomorrow, as we look at how we move into this authentic state of being that’s at the heart of each of us.

Why do humans develop an ego? I am talking about that aspect of ourselves that we picture ourselves being, think of ourselves as, imagine ourselves to be. In other words, our self-image.

This is quite distinct from being, which is a state in which we don’t picture or think about ourselves but simply are immersed in the moment, caught up in the total flow of life.

Being ourselves is quite different from having a self-image. We don’t need to improve our self-image and strengthen our ego. We need to simply be the authentic individual we have the potential to be, which allows our self-image, or ego, to diminish.

The ego is not bad, not something that shouldn’t have developed, and not our enemy. However, it does need to be outgrown. But, as we will see, this can only happen on the body's schedule!

Recently, I heard the story of a person who, when he was very young, experienced an event that caused his brain to take a defensive action, pulling him into a ball to protect him from the assault he was under. The brain then adopted this pattern as a way of being in life because this pattern saved his life at one time.

The problem is, once a pattern has been adopted, the brain likes to keep it because it worked. At this stage of our development, it doesn't know any better. So this person’s whole life for years to come was marked by holding back. It became his way of being in the world—his self-image, his ego. He simply wasn’t free to be his authentic self.

The infant and child's brain is fragile because its neural network is not yet well established. So the brain acts to protect itself all the time, establishing defensive responses to life's threats. These are not bad, they are good! They save our life, our sanity, at the time. They get us through this delicate, fragile period of our life.

But these defensive patterns then become dominant, and collectively they form what we call the ego—a defensive, protective shield, which is the ego's essential trait. It is an absolutely necessary function of the brain for a particular period of life!

And this is why the ego and what Eckhart Tolle calls the “pain body” are so closely linked—two sides of a single coin, in fact. The protective mode of being we know as the ego develops precisely in proportion to the pain we experience, which the brain has to protect us from. Ego forms as a defense against situations the brain isn't yet developed enough to cope with.

As we mature in life, we become more capable of handling challenging and painful experiences. The brain is more resilient. Still, until about age forty, the brain literally does not have the capability of dealing with some emotional traumas. It does not physically achieve the competence to do so until this age.

There is actually a chemical change in the brain at around this age, which allows us to engage fully the work of midlife—that period we often refer to as midlife crisis, which is when we revisit issues we were unable to deal with earlier in life.

Now, we can negotiate these aspects of our life and respond to them authentically rather than defensively. This is why so many awaken around or after this age.

So this is why the ego has to develop early in life, proportionate to the age and fragility of the individual, coupled with the pain we experience—and why we don't address so many of our inauthentic traits, each a product of the ego, until we reach midlife.

As ego begins to break down, it gives way to a more solid identity flowing from spirit. We at last become authentic, our real self.

Understanding this allows us to stop struggling to change ourselves, and instead simply allow life to unfold on its own timetable. There is nowhere to get to, simply everything to be at each appropriate stage of the journey.

Amazingly, when we relax into being instead of struggling with ourselves, what we long to be begins to be a reality. This is why Jesus said, “Come unto me all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you [he’s referring to the yoke of an ox, used in plowing the fields], for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Jesus is a symbol of the true self of all humanity—who we are in our essence. He represents our authentic being, the divine image that is our spirit. When we simply allow this Christ nature in us to become our reality, the strain and struggle disappears from life. Our development flows easily, naturally, spontaneously, organically. Like a flower, we unfold and blossom without effort, right on schedule.

It’s our striving, searching, struggling that holds us back.

We each have an inner knower. It knows just the right thing to do at any given time in any set of circumstances.

The common term for this is intuition.

But there’s a problem with the word intuition. Many of us speak of our intuition guiding us, when in fact it isn’t our intuition—our inner knower—that’s speaking to us at all.

What’s speaking to us is established brain patterns that feel safe, security, comfortable. Therefore, anything that veers from these patterns appears to be a red flag. It feels distinctly disquieting.

The trouble with established brain patterns is that they were put in place to serve us at a particular moment in time. At that time, they may well have even saved our life. Certainly they were of benefit to us in some important way at that time, protecting and preserving us.

That they served us well in the past doesn’t mean they still serve us well today.

Much of the time, what we call our intuition is actually made up of fearful brain patterns. The information coming to us feels intuitive because it’s deeply embedded in us, since it’s a brain pattern and such patterns are integral to our functioning. But it’s not our inner knower at all. The bestseller Get Out of Your Own Way is worth reading if you want to understand this better.

So how can we differentiate the voice of our inner knower—our real intuition—from the voice of old brain patterns that masquerade as our intuition?

When we embrace the natural feeling inherent in an experience, we are in touch with the inner knower, our real intuition. It will show us whatever action is necessary in the present moment.

They key words are natural, feeling, and inherent in the experience. This isn’t a concept we project onto the experience—it isn’t our thoughts about it, our analysis of it. The voice of the inner knower will be entirely free of concepts of what should or shouldn’t happen. It will simply show us what’s right for this moment.

When I say “inherent in the natural experience,” it means we don’t have to think about it. If we have to think about it, it’s not our inner knower.

The other aspect of the inner knower, unlike what people often think of as their intuition, is that it has no emotional charge to it.

If something has a charge, it’s not the inner knower. It’s an old brain pattern. The red flag is an emotional pattern, not our authentic intuition.

In practice, discerning the difference can be quite challenging until we get the hang of it. We are going to repeatedly think it’s our inner knower guiding us, when it’s a brain pattern from the past that served us at that time but isn’t useful now. In fact, it keeps us stuck.

We are talking about something emerging from within that requires no thought, no agonizing, no analyzing, no discussion. With a complete calmness, entirely free of fears, we just know. If we have to tell ourselves in any way, or have others tell us—or if it comes with a charge—it’s not the inner knower.

Free of emotional charge—this is the still, small voice of Presence. It’s a quiet knowing, detached from all of the emotional wallop of most of what we call red flags, which are just our fears.

Our inner knower will guide us correctly every time. We cannot miss as long as we don’t reason ourselves out of its still, small voice within us.

Sometimes, consciousness aside, I screw up. How about you? My guess is that if we are honest, we all know we screw up at times. It can be costly to screw up, as you will see.

I was driving to the airport about three weeks ago here in the Phoenix area where I’ve been for the last six months working on a couple of forthcoming Namaste books. My flight to Ontario, Canada, was at 6 AM. I left where I’m staying at 4 AM, and the airport is only thirty minutes away.

I had arranged parking at an off-airport site for $90 for the thirteen days I would be away. Taking a cab, because of the distance, would have been considerably more round trip, and I don’t impose 4 AM rides to the airport on friends.

The off-airport site had an announcement on its website to call and check directions because there were some road improvements taking place at various times. I called the night before and was told all was clear.

It wasn’t clear. Far from it.

As I headed to the airport next morning, the route the online instructions told me to take was closed off. Though I was in reasonable time, before I knew it I had driven around so many times trying to find my way through the construction—and talked to others trying to do the same thing but like me ending up in dead-ends—that it was 5:20 AM. My flight was in 40 minutes, and I was by now having visions of it leaving without me, especially with the current level of security checks.

There was only one thing for it: drive to the airport and park in long stay. It would be more expensive, but not killing.

Except that, at 5:25 AM, when I got to the entrance of long stay, it was cordoned off by police everywhere. Was Presidential hopeful John McCain on his way out of town? Whatever the reason, at this point I was left with no choice.

I ditched my car in the only parking that allowed me to catch the flight: short stay. $25 a day, and I was to be gone thirteen days. This totals out at $325. Gulp. Like, is the universe trying to put me in bankruptcy court?

Unbelievably, I got through security, check in, and made it onto the plane for the on-time 6 AM departure. The flight was smooth, the thirteen days incredibly productive thanks to my MacBook Air, and the entire experience spiritually enriching.

Upon arrival back in Phoenix, I walked, luggage in tow, to where I was certain I had parked. Except, recall what a rush I was in the morning of my departure. Not exactly the most present, aware, conscious moment of my life.

Forty-five minutes later, I passed one of those flashing blue beacons for the umpteenth time and made the call. A wonderful gentleman from Ethiopia was sent out to rescue me, whose presence and demeanor I thoroughly enjoyed. We drove and drove, but my car eluded us.

Finally, we went back to his base, where he accessed the computer, I told him what time and date I entered the parking garage, and he pulled up a photo of the car. We got back in his truck, flashing light whirling, and within minutes had located my vehicle, which we had missed because of how it was now sandwiched between two extremely large vehicles. I tipped him $20 for his kindness, patience, and calmness.

There’s a lesson in this. It comes from the story of Elijah, in the ancient Jewish sacred scriptures. Elijah wanted to meet God. So God sent him to a desolate spot in the mountains, then passed by.

There was a mighty wind, like a fierce tornado. There was an earthquake, so powerful it shattered huge boulders. There was a fire, the kind ignited in the wilderness by lightning. In all of this, God was not to be found.

Following this display of drama, there was a “still, small voice.”

The text says quite simply, “And in that still voice, onward came Yahweh.”

As I drove to the airport that morning of my departure, I came to a division in the interstate system, where 101 goes one direction and 202 another. The instructions said take 202, toward the airport. I followed the instructions.

At that moment of decision, there was a tiny—oh, so tiny!—voice in me that said, “Take 101. It will get you there.” But 101 was contrary to the instructions.

After shelling out a total of $345, I believe I have an acute awareness now of what that “still, small voice” of divine consciousness sounds like.

In a column a few days ago, I mentioned how, when we think we have absolute clarity on an issue—especially about another person, or directions on a website—this is when we most need to doubt ourselves.

The directions and map from the website that morning gave me absolute clarity. They were in error.

When we know that we know that we know—about something, or someone—this is the time to listen to that vague sense in the background, that ever so little and almost silent voice, which calls what we are so certain of into question. Perhaps we might just have misunderstood something.

It’s a costly voice to ignore, costing us financially perhaps, but more especially costing us our happiness.