Vernon Howard wrote with such clarity and simplicity.  His writings are full of encouragement:

“Never forget this simple but remarkable reality:  The more you walk toward the mountain, the more you walk away from the desert.   This means you need attend only to where you are going, not to where you are or where you have been.  As long as you are headed for the mountains, what slightest concern need you have for the scorched desert?  The desert is not your home; the mountain-top is your dwelling place.

A tremendous gush of energy pushes you forward, once you realize that everything you do is done for your own sake.  The ordinary man does not really see this.  What little work he does is done from an annoying sense of required duty, or because it satisfies his imaginary image of being a sincere seeker.  There is  no energy in this, on the contrary, it is a burdensome drain on natural forces.  The gush of fresh power comes from sighting that we are actually working for ourselves.

–Vernon Howard,  Mystic Path to Cosmic Power

Inner Life Exercise

Murray Oxman was always seeking, 24 hours a day, ways to improve his life by finding spiritual lessons in all he observed.   Here’s a great exercise from his  ‘Relationships’  handbook to improve all  your human relations:

“The problem has nothing to do with the relationship.  The problem is you.  The problem is not the other person or the circumstances.  It’s you.  We always want to believe, and do believe, that our problems come from outside of us — that we are the poor victims.  The fact is that we are both the source of the problem and the victim.  Our unawareness of our inner-world makes it a perfect breeding ground for problems of all types.  Because we are sure the source of our problems is outside of us, they easily ambush us from within.  If we get our feelings hurt, get angry, get depressed, etc. — it’s an inside job.  Nothing outside of us is hurting us.  We hurt ourselves because we are frozen in our beliefs.  If we will allow the Truth to thaw us, then we can catch ourselves in the act.  Catching yourself in the act is the beginning of the end of hurting yourself.  And in a relationship, if both people are catching themselves, the two of them can breathe new life constantly into the relationship.  In life, everything is either getting worse or getting better.  Working on oneself insures that your life does not go downhill, but to the contrary, goes delightfully uphill to the beautiful mountaintop.”

–Murray Oxman,  The Secrets of Truly Beautiful Relationships

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