You never really know how or when your life is going to change, and that's for the best.

Healing requires far more of us than just the participation of our intellectual and even our emotional resources. And it certainly demands that we do more than look backwards at the dead-end archives of our past. Healing is, by definition, taking a process of disintegration of life and transforming into a process of return to life.

As I have often written, power is the fundamental ingredient of the human experience. Every action in life, every thought, every choice we make--even down to what we wear and whether we are seating in first class or coach--represents a negotiation of power somewhere on the scale of power that constitutes life.

I am convinced that the deepest desire within each of us is to be liberated from the controlling influences of our own psychic madness or patterns of fear. All other things--the disdain of ordinary life, the need to control others rather than be controlled, the craving for material goods as a means of security and protection against the winds of chaos--are external props that serve as substitutes for the real battle, which is the one waged within the individual soul.

It is a rare person who can pierce the veil between ordinarly life, consumed with matters of physical survival, and pursuit of the empowered path of purpose and meaning unless he or she is motivated by a crisis. Most often we require the failure of some system of power that we rely on before we take action.