Everything the conscious mind puts in this spotlight—were we to get it—would, we believe, gloriously prove that we're finally and truly the ideal selves that we think we need to be in order to be okay.

The thing about guilt is that most of us continue to use it long after its value expires.

It might seem like “feeling guilty” or “feeling bad” just spontaneously happens to you, but it doesn't. It's an unconscious choice, a strategy designed long ago by your child mind to get you something, namely, the approval of the people around you, whom you depended upon for your survival and security.

So “because I have deep fear that other people will hate me” becomes “because I have deep fear that I am unwilling to feel the sensation of other people hating me.”

Once you've done Deepest Fear Inventory for a few weeks, it becomes very, very clear that the reason you don't have the thing you say you want is not because “the world is cruel” or “I'm just not good enough to have it,” it's because there's a strong part of you that's afraid of the thing you say you want for a host of reasons, that doesn't yet act

Marianne Williamson's famous, wise observation in her book A Return to Love, that “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond all measure.”

Choose just one desire to focus on for the next three months. Not your whole life, just the next three months.

When you just own your desire, without trying to prop it up with reference to anything, you gain a sense of responsibility for that desire which can clarify all your actions and slice through the Gordian knot of your conflicts.

There's a lot of power in not looking for “reasons” to do things, because equally compelling reasons can be found for everything.