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note: This is a summary of much of what can be found in Don Miguel Ruiz’s book The Voice of Knowledge. If you would like to read more about it, I highly recommend checking out his book (any of them for that matter).

We’re born completely authentic. But something happens as we grow up; our authenticity is broken. Growing up we naturally want to please our parents. When we do something “good” we are told we are a “good boy” or a “good girl.” But when we do something “bad” we are told we are a “bad boy” or a “bad girl.” Our parents love us and are just trying to do what’s best for us. But behind their praise and chastising we hear a hidden message: it’s not okay to be who I am.

We are told this in school as well “You had better work hard and get good grades if you want to make something of your life.” Our teachers have the best intentions, but we still hear the hidden message: who I am right now is not good enough.

Our parents, siblings, friends and teachers all have an opinion of us. They think we would be best if we were this way or that way. We should be a certain way, but we are not. This is the beginning of our image of perfection.

The Image of Perfection

Before long we don’t need our teachers and parents to give us this image of perfection, we now have our own judge and our own victim inside our minds. We judge ourselves according to this image. We’re not good enough, we’re not smart enough, we don’t do enough, accomplish enough. We see what we should be, but we are not. In this the drama begins to unfold and the judge and the victim inside our head begin to rule our life.

This voice in our heads (otherwise known as the Voice of Knowledge) is constantly judging us and judging everyone else. But it is based on an image of perfection that we will never achieve! We are born perfect, nothing we do can ever make us perfect. We’re searching for a false image.

Imagine you’re building a house and you need a certain amount of wood to put up the frame. You know you need a certain amount of two by fours, four by fours and plywood. If you run out of wood for a certain part of the frame, you don’t blame the two by fours for being too short. You also don’t blame the plywood for being too flat.

We don’t judge the different pieces of wood for not being anything other then they are. But we do this with ourselves all the time.

A Beautiful Mind

Let’s look at the example of the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” The main character in this movie is a schizophrenic, but he’s also a genius. The problem is he sees people who don’t exist. The people he sees are controlling his life because he listens to them and does whatever they want him to do. After his wife discovers his condition, she puts him in an insane asylum. It’s not until he is given medication that he is able to see his hallucinations aren’t real.

The drug, however, gives him side effects so he stops taking the medication. Now he is faced with a choice, he can either go back to the hospital, lose his wife and accept his mental illness, or he can face the visions and overcome them.

He makes the choice to stay off the medication and battle his hallucinations. He decides “Whenever I see these people, I won’t listen to them. I won’t believe what they tell me.” The more he persists, the less power the visions have over him and he regains his personal freedom.

The beauty of this story is that it shows that if you don’t believe the voice in your head, it loses the power it has over you. So how can we conque the voice in our own head? How can we conquer the tyrant that is ruling our life?

Taming the Voice; Two Rules

Don Miguel Ruiz offers two simple rules for conquering the voice in your head:

1. Don’t believe yourself. But listen to the voice of knowledge because sometimes it might have a brilliant idea. Don’t believe yourself mainly when you are using the voice against yourself. How many times have you said “yes” when you really wanted to say “no”? In the same way, how many times have you said “no” when you really wanted to say “yes”? You didn’t listen to your integrity because the voice in your head wouldn’t let you. The voice in your head is the ability to judge. Because of that, it will always say two different, conflicting things. Listen to the voice, but don’t believe it.

2. Don’t believe anybody else. Just because someone else is telling your their opinion, doesn’t make it true. Realize that they are speaking from the perspective of their own story. When people are talking to you, don’t judge what they have to say, don’t believe what they say. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to them. Listen to their story and follow your own integrity. When someone is speaking from their integrity, our own integrity will be able to recognize it.

As I’ve said earlier, knowledge is the ability to judge. The voice in our head is the voice of knowledge. But that voice is like a wild horse, taking us wherever it wants to go. Once you tame the horse, you can ride the horse. With it, you can take yourself whever you want to go.

Using these two rules has helped me find inner peace. Searching for answers, I knew my image of perfection was unrealistic. I knew that striving for that would never bring me freedom. Knowledge is a valuable tool, but like all great tools, they have their disadvantages. And the principle disadvantage of knowledge is that we confuse it with reality. In reality, everything is perfect. Judgment is a part of reality, but reality itself is beyond judgment.

Points to ponder:

• The truth survives our skepticism, but we can’t say the same about lies. Lies only exist if we believe in them. The truth is the truth whether we believe in it or not. That’s the beauty of the truth.

• The voice of knowledge is a tyrant and it is ruling your life. If you refuse to believe what it says, it will become quieter and quieter. You can now use the voice of knowledge as a tool and reclaim your authenticitiy.

• Everything in creation is perfect, but we don’t see that because our attention is focused on the lies. With awareness, we can recover our authenticity and live in truth.

In the next series on Truth I’ll be talking about the Four Agreements and how you can use them to recover your personal freedom.

What are your thoughts on the Voice of Knowledge? Has the voice inside your head been ruining your life?

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We’ve all had the experience of being our own worst critic. One part of our mind is encouraging, the other is doubtful. One side of our mind says “follow your dreams!” and the other side says “you’ll never make it.”

Is it possible that the story of Adam and Eve can explain this conflict, this battle for our mind?

Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, they lived in communion with God, they were one with Him.

But when Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, they experienced separation from God. For the first time they started searching for what they already had within them.

Adam and Eve; A Different Point of View

In The Voice of Knowledge, Don Miguel Ruiz offers the familiar story of Adam and Eve from a different light. Here is the summary:

“The story of Adam and Eve is one of the greatest teachings ever, but one that I believe is greatly misunderstood. Now I will tell you this story from a different point of view, perhaps the same point of view of the one who created it.

The story of Adam and Eve is about you and me, man and woman. We are the original humans, because we are all one.

The story begins when we were innocent, before we fell from heaven and closed our spiritual eyes. We used to live in the Garden of Eden, which is heaven on earth. That is before we closed our spiritual eyes. Heaven only exists when our spiritual eyes are open. It is a place of joy, freedom and eternal love. When we lived in Heaven, everything was effortless. We saw everything through the eyes of Truth.

Well, the legend said in the middle of Paradise stood two trees. One was the Tree of Life, which gave life to everything in existence and the other was the Tree of Death, better known as the Tree of Knowledge. God told us “Don’t go near the Tree of Knowledge. If you eat the fruit, you may die.”

The Prince of Lies.

But by nature we love to explore and naturally we went to pay a visit to the tree. And guess who lived in that tree? A big snake, also known as the Prince of Lies. According to the story, the Prince of Lies was living in that tree and the fruit of all that tree, which was knowledge, was contaminated with lies. Upon visiting the tree we had a conversation with the Prince. Because we were innocent and we trusted everyone, we also trusted the liar. The liar told us we could become powerful if we ate the fruit of the tree and because we were innocent, we believed him.

When we bit into the apple, we ate the lies that came with knowledge. The mind is a fertile ground for concepts and ideas, concepts and opinions. If we believe a lie, it takes root in our mind. We put our faith in it. The more faith we have in it, the more the seed grows and can become a big strong tree. One little lie can be very contagious, spreading the seeds from person to person when we share it with others. Because we ate the fruit from that tree, now the liar, or the voice of knowledge lives inside our mind.

The Beginning of Knowledge

The legend says that whoever eats the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge will have the knowledge of good and evil, they will know the difference between right and wrong, and what is beautiful and what is ugly. They will gather that knowledge and begin to judge.

Each of us has our own personal Tree of Knowledge that contains every opinion, idea and concept we have. It is the foundation of our belief system. Every concept, every opinion we have, forms a little branch on that tree that makes up our whole Tree of Knowledge. As soon as that tree is alive in our mind, we hear the fallen angel talking very loudly. The same fallen angel that lived in the Tree of Knowledge, now lives inside our mind. Now the parasite is living our life and it survives inside our head because we feed it with our faith.

The story of Adam and Eve explains how we fell from heaven and into the dream of hell. The moment we ate the fruit from that tree, our spiritual eyes closed. We no longer saw from the eyes of truth and love, we saw from the eyes of knowledge. We begin to judge ourselves and others. With judgment comes separation and polarity. And that voice never stops judging. It judges everything we do and everything we don’t do, whatever we feel and whatever we don’t feel and whatever everybody else does. And what comes out of that voice? Mostly lies.

Clouds in our mind.

The lies consume our attention so greatly that all we can see are lies. That’s why we don’t see the reality that heaven exists in this same place,

in the same time. Heaven belongs to use because we are the children of heaven. But the voice doesn’t belong to us. When we are born, we are authentic and we don’t have the Voice of Knowledge. The voice in our head comes through learning- first language, then different points of view, then all the judgments and lies.

In the moment we are separated from God, we begin to search for God. For the first time, we are searching for something that already exists within us. We started to search for the love we believed we didn’t have.

It is true what God told us: if you eat from the Tree of Knowledge, you may die. Well we ate it and we are dead. We are dead because we are no longer authentic. The Voice of Knowledge now runs our life. You can call it thinking, I call it the voice of knowledge.”

Moral of the Story

Because we are viewing life through the lens of knowledge, we no longer see through the eyes of truth. Some people say the path to truth is through knowledge, but I believe this isn’t so. Truth is the truth regardless of whether we believe in it or not. That’s the beauty of truth. Truth is self evident.

The Tree of Knowledge is a powerful symbol. It explains our “fall from heaven” into the dream of hell through the awakening of knowledge. The reason knowledge puts us in hell is because with knowledge, comes judgment. But in reality there is no judgment, there just is. Right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, only exist within our mind. When we suspend judgment, everything becomes beautiful.

Knowledge: A Double Edged Sword

With knowledge we can use our word to sculpt our reality. We can change our internal dialogue; through knowledge we have response-ability. We can take a given situation and choose the best possible response. Or if we have a negative mindset, we can choose a self-defeating response.

The power of knowledge is the power of judgment. Its power is also its weakness.

With judgment we create a false image of perfection. We judge our actions and our thoughts, some we label as good, others as bad. We obviously want to be on the good side though, so we punish ourselves when we do something that doesn’t live up to our expectations. What we fail to realize is that good and bad, are two parts of them same whole.

I think that’s what they meant by Original Sin. If you look up the root of sin, it means to go against. Original Sin, was the first time we went against ourself.

The Jeckyl and Hyde Within Our Minds

It’s not a far cry from Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde. Like the famed story by Robert Louis Stevenson, we too have a Jeckyl and Hyde within us. One side of our mind says yes, the other says no. One side plays the judge, the other the victim. How many times have you punished or judged yourself for making a mistake? The same voice that is ridiculing and punishing us, is the same voice that caused us to make that choice in the first place!

So the question is…

How do we tame the beast of knowledge?

The answer will be in my next article in the Truth series called “The Lie of Our Imperfection.”

Subscribe now to make sure you win the battle for your mind.

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Isn’t the essential reason behind greater productivity, greater happiness? Aren’t we supposed to get more done so we can have more time for the things we enjoy?

Our pursuit of increased productivity, should result in increased happiness right? But do we really feel free?

Our aim to be more productive and increase efficiency can often lead to obsession. We confuse achievement for happiness. Our happiness should be the inspiration for achievement, not the other way around. When our happiness is found in achievement, we get sucked into constantly putting our happiness in the future.

We’ll allow ourselves happiness when..

… We pay off our debt.
… We don’t have anymore problems.
… We lose 20 pounds.
… We have x amount of money in the bank.
… Our lives are perfect.

There’s nothing wrong with being more productive, the problem occurs when our happiness is determined by it.

The Truth is.. We’re Often the Happiest When What We’re Doing Has Absolutely no Purpose.

We create productivity systems to make us more efficient and get more done. When we originally start on this path, our reason is to have more free time and decrease the stress of unfinished tasks hanging over our heads. If it’s done, we don’t have to think about it anymore, right?

But somewhere along the lines we lose sight and our desire to accomplish becomes an obsession. We’ve become a member of the cult of productivity. Productivity is no longer a means to an end, it’s the end entirely. In fact, we never get there, do we?

That’s Because.. There’s Always Something to Obsess Over.

The essential tenet of the cult of productivity is we’ve turned a means into an end. We no longer see the forest for the trees. Instead of doing things to enjoy them, we do things solely for the future benefit. We never get there though because we’re constantly living in the future. I’ve been there and it sucks.

A few symptoms of this disease are…

… Meditation for the sake of gaining a clearer, calmer mind, and increased ability to focus.
… Exercising for the benefit of better health, stamina and increased energy.
… Organization for the sake of a clearer mind and fewer distractions.
… Socializing to make more contacts and increase your circle of influence.
… Personal development for the sake of it.

There’s nothing really wrong with any of these things up front (except perhaps that last one.) The problem is when do these things because we know we should. Instead of a joy and a means to improve our life, they’ve become grim duties.

I’ve found myself caught up in this rat race. Becoming obsessed with making more money, being a better employee, a better husband, a better person, a better organizer, a more likable person. All of these things seem like noble pursuits, but when you lose sight of your intentions, you become a slave to your goals.

We’re no longer doing them, they’re doing us. Our obsession with our goals has moved us from inspiration, to enslavement. I know I’m not the only one that’s experienced this. It’s hard to remember the authentic reason for your goals and not let your ego’s identity get caught up in them.

We’re so obsessed with the outcome that we don’t even appreciate the results when they arrive. We’re already caught up in “what’s next.”

Productivity is Not the Root of Happiness.

Judging your happiness based on productivity doesn’t make much sense when happiness is the root of productivity. Productivity will never be the root of happiness.

If your goals are starting to own you, maybe it’s time you took a step back and re-evaluated your life. Are your goals serving you, or have they become insufferable, bovine taskmasters?

We need to have the courage to re-evaluate, drop and re-prioritize our goals at any time. Our lives aren’t static. A goal that may have served you well a year ago, could be completely out of alignment with your life now. Sometimes quitting things or breaking up is the best answer.

When it comes down to it, the most important thing is how we feel. If our goals are making us feel like sh*t, then they’re probably not doing much good for us.

If you count every minute that goes by till 5 o’clock, maybe you need to say “I quit.” If your friends are bringing you down, perhaps it’s time to let them go. All of this takes guts and can be absolutely terrifying. But how much time do you have to live a life that is less than what you dream of? Most people aren’t afraid of dying as much as they’re afraid of truly living. Letting go of fear is scary in and of itself. That’s because you’ll no longer have your ego to hide behind. You’ll no longer have your socially conditioned idea of “what I should do” to crouch yourself down under.

Most people in our time have a internal conflict between what they love (what they want to do) and what they feel is practical (what they should do). The solution to this problem isn’t easy, but the answer is clear. You don’t have to settle for either or.

What it Really Takes: The Marriage of Your Heart and Mind

Just like any relationship, the marriage of your heart and mind requires hard work. Their might be a honeymoon stage at first. You’ll blissfully forget the world and follow the most impractical notions. Enjoy it. But reality will set in sooner or later and you’ll have to do some real soul searching. You’ll have to re-create a relationship that satisfies both your heart and your mind’s needs. Anything less just isn’t worth living for.

If you feel like you’re getting caught up in ego-driven goals and you’re drowning in your own expectations, it’s time to stop and think about where your life is going. If your “sacrifices” are making you miserable, maybe they weren’t worth it in the first place. Just ask yourself.. Does this make me feel alive?

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We spend a lot of time trying to break bad habits and replace them with new, positive ones. But how do we expect to break bad habits when we’ve said “I do” to them?

We may consciously be trying to break these habits, but sub-consciously we’re reaffirming our “vows” to them day after day.

Whether or not you’ve been married or have gone through a divorce, we’ve all experienced a breakup with a partner or the loss of a friend. Some of the relationships I’ve had I knew were unhealthy and needed to end, but I held on because I didn’t want to experience the pain of the breakup.

But how do you know if you’ve inadvertently married your bad habits?

Here are 5 signs that you’ve said “until death do we part.”

1. Breaking up has become an obsession.

Common sense would tell us that if we really want to break a bad habit, we need to spend lots of energy focusing on it and willing it away. Has this ever really worked for you? It hasn’t for me. I’ll tell you why.

The more time we spend obsessing over the habits we want to break, the more energy we’re feeding them. One common example is quitting smoking. Let’s say you’re obsessed with quitting smoking. It’s all you can think about. Day after day, hour after minute after second you tell yourself “I quit,” “This is my last cigarette,” or “I’m cutting down, I’m going to ween myself off of smoking. This is it.”

Logic would tell us that all this energy we’re putting into “quitting” would propel us toward breaking the habit. However, what’s really happening is we’re reinforcing the attachment to smoking every time we have this personal dialogue. Instead we should change our dialogue to “I breathe easily,” “my lungs are clean and healthy,” or “I have control over my actions.” Now we’re reinforcing the positive effect we want, instead of the negative.

If we go back to the analogy of the relationship, we can easily see why this is so important. If you’re in an abusive relationship and your thoughts are centered on ending the abuse, you’re still focused on abuse. Your thoughts are constantly re-affirming it. If you change your thoughts to health, love, and acceptance, now you’re opening the doors for change.

2. Making up is easier than breaking up.

Another paramount reason we have trouble breaking bad habits is that we’ve formed such a strong relationship with them. Anytime we think about our life without our habit, there’s internal resistance (I’ll elaborate on this in the next 3 points.)

Letting go is one of the hardest parts of breaking an old habit because we identify ourselves with it so much.

Instead of focusing on the loss of your obsession (because if we’re going to be honest, that’s what it really is) focus on what you’ll gain. Focus on the new healthy habits that you can replace them with. Instead of focusing on the pain of letting go of your obsession, focus on all of the benefits that “breaking up” will bring.

3. My relationship defines me.

One of the biggest reasons we have trouble letting go of old habits is that we identify ourselves with them. Just as you identify yourself in many ways with your social status, your job, values, character, you identify yourself with negative habits as well. If you’re a smoker you not only identify yourself as one, but you identify with all of the associations smokers have as well. Perhaps you think that smoking makes you look cool or makes you seem interesting. Many people also identify their smoking with creativity.

To stop our tendency of identifying with our habits, we can instead identify with our values. We can see that the things we do, don’t necessarily define us. Our sense of self will be defined by our principles, not by our position or our habits. This is essential to letting go.

4. I’ll lose my security blanket.

Attachment is the effect of identifying with our habits. Identifying ourselves with our habits we naturally become attached

Many abusive relationships continue because of attachment. They identify with the relationship and feel if it ends, part of them ends too. If our sense of self is found in our values, instead of the constantly changing terrain of our lives, we can learn to let go. Our identity is safe no matter what turns or curves our life takes.

Are you waiting to end your relationship with your bad habits simply because you’re afraid of letting go?

5. I don’t want to be alone.

The last sign that you’ve married your bad habits is you feel empty without it. I chose this as the last point because it’s about transition, moving from the old to the new. Many people resist change because they feel if they let go, they will be left with a void in their life.

It’s true to a certain extent, the feeling of emptiness is a part of loss. Many people resist breaking ties with their old ways because they’d rather have the comfort of unhealthy habits then experience loss.

When we divorce our bad habits, we need to create new and healthy ones in their places. Not create a life that’s a featureless blank. The problem with this is many people have become so habituated in their ways they couldn’t even imagine what something different would look like. If you’ve been in an abusive relationship with yourself your whole life, it will be very hard for you to imagine what a loving non-judgmental relationship would feel like.

In order to create new, healthier habits in the place of old life-sucking ones, we need to have courage. We need to be unafraid to explore new ways of living. It will take time to re-identify yourself with your new lifestyle (allowing yourself to mourn and taking the time to say goodbye is a healthy process.)

We form relationships with our habits just as we do our parents, partners and friends. Sometimes it’s hard to tell why we can’t let go, when all we seem to do is distance ourselves. Hell, I moved from Los Angeles to Seattle and I still went back to my ex.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I couldn’t let go because I had become so attached. In the same way, I would try to break it off with my bad habits but still came crawling back. It’s like my habits were a giant magnet and the more I tried to pull away, the more I was attracted back to it.

What I didn’t know is that my obsession with the habit was actually the magnet itself.

Breaking ties with old habits isn’t easy. It takes guts to let go when you’ve formed a close relationship with your problems. You’ll probably experience some separation anxiety.

When it’s over you may look back in fondness at the bad habits you used to have, you might even realize they were there to teach you something. They helped you realize the life that you needed to lead.

You may even realize that your problems were opportunities to grow in disguise.

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photo by Mrs. Maze

It seems everyone is looking for a secret. Everyone wants the mysterious answer to their problems that somehow eludes them day after day. If only they knew the secret to success, the secret to loving relationships, the secret to losing weight, the secret to being more productive.

It’s easy to see this when so many books on personal development, self help, money, wealth, fitness, and relationships claim to have some secret. “The Secret to a Flatter Stomach in 30 days,” “The Secret to Unlimited Wealth,” or “The Secret to Happiness.”

Is there really a secret though? Or do marketers simply thrive off the allure of proclaiming a so-called secret, something they’ve figured out that no one else has yet grasped? The real secret is..

There is no secret.

That’s right, there is no secret. But everyone’s looking for one, right?

The allure of a secret is so powerful because it implies some hidden knowledge that someone has kept from others because it’s so powerful. The people that know these so-called secrets don’t want others to know about it, because in knowing it, they might be able to compete with them on the same level.

The generous authors of numerous books, seminars and workshops want to give you the secret. How selfless of them. =)

But most of the time when their secrets are revealed they turn out to be nothing more than a quick fix gimmick. A new weight loss pill that will allow you to eat whatever you want and still lose weight! Or the secret to starting a business that will make you rich within months!

The other less common probability when a secret is revealed is that it turns out it wasn’t a secret at all, it was simply common sense.

After all, what’s the biggest secret that’s hit self-help stands across the nation? The Law of Attraction. The makers of the film about this “law” were so bold to call this The Secret.

I think there is a lot of benefit to focusing your thoughts and intentions on what you want to manifest in your life. Don’t get me wrong, I think moving from focusing on what you want, rather than what you don’t want is a big step for many people. As well as the idea that your thoughts manifest reality. But is this really a secret? I don’t think so.

The problem with secrets is they get people so excited over some new realization that’s going to change their lives instantly. Now that they’ve solved the mystery, everything is going to suddenly transform right? Not exactly.

Discovering a new realization, something that is more in alignment (hence the reason they call it the law of attraction) with reality is a big step. It has the power to change lives. The hype of a secret, some new idea that’s going to completely transform your existence is the issue. Discovering a new, more accurate paradigm for reality is huge, but actually implementing that new paradigm into your life is something else entirely.

When people are so focused on the excitement of learning some new secret, they don’t realize what they learned was really…

Common Sense

The Law of Attraction is really common sense. A lot of people might argue with this, because it seems that thoughts creating reality isn’t so obvious. That may be true. It’s easy to see your physical existence as a product of your environment. After all, you are you, and everything else is “out there.” Your thoughts are a product of your environment, right?

Common sense would tell us, yes, our thoughts are a product of our environment. But that’s only looking at half of the picture. That’s implying that physical reality is bigger than us, we are merely perceiving it. We don’t just perceive though, we interpret and respond. We respond not only with actions, but with thoughts as well. And of course we all know thoughts create actions.
So how do thoughts create reality? We must also recognize that just as we respond to the physical world, the physical world responds to us. That’s the part they don’t teach you in school.

Common sense can take us a step further to better explain the law of attraction. Everyone knows that thoughts determine actions. But what about our thoughts manifesting things that aren’t a direct result of our action? Explaining that requires a whole new paradigm. Maybe a secret paradigm? Or can we explain it with common sense? Let’s give it a try.

We all know that we have a physical body, and that we interact in an environment. How do you describe a person though? You describe them by their behavior, what they do. But you can’t describe what a person does without describing their environment. You can’t describe the environment without describing the city, the state, country, continent, planet, solar system, galaxy and eventually the universe. In the same way for us to describe the universe, we describe the stars in the universe. We describe the matter of the stars, their relationship to galaxies, solar systems and planets. We describe the planet in its relation to life, to the water, atmosphere, and land. We describe the water and the land based on the life that inhabits it. Can you see where I’m going with this?

When we really take common sense as far as we can take it, we realize that everything is relational. We realize that every part relies on the other parts. The parts make a whole and the whole makes the parts. This is what’s not as easy to see; in the whole you see the parts, but in the parts there is also the whole.

When we see that each part is the whole it’s easy to understand how the law of attraction works. When you create an intention that intention is not just your individual consciousness’ intention, it is also the intention of the entire universe as well.

So what does this all have to do with secrets?

The reason I wanted to illustrate this point is to show you that there really are no secrets. But there is a lot of common sense.

The reason secrets are so touchy is because they imply a lot of hype. They imply a quick fix to solving your problems. And while a secret may show you some new insight that will help you, there is still the hard work of implementing that new realization. Changing our beliefs and changing our habits requires hard work. This is a rude awakening for secret seekers.

If we are able to realize that underlying secrets (that are actually based on truth) are really common sense, we can approach things from a new level. We can accept that common sense took us there and that common sense will tell us it may not be easy implementing these new habits.

There is no magic pill. Real magic happens when people apply these secrets in their lives.

True transformation involves no quick fixes and real growth can be very challenging. It may not be as glamorous and alluring. But it will be genuine.

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