In each section, I'll be offering you an insight and an opportunity to sign off  on it. Once you understand what I'm getting at, if it makes sense to you, feel free to jump to the next insight.

But please, please, please don't jump forward until you feel that you can at least provisionally endorse that insight. If you don't understand or can’t get on board with what I’m saying, try reading the section again (most of them are pretty short), or just sit quietly with the idea I’m presenting and see if starts to make sense.

I promise I'll play fair, and simply ask you to consider the perspective I'm putting forth. In return, I ask you to consider it, and see if you can't at least see what I'm saying enough to move forward without entirely resisting the direction we're going.

The ideas here are far from new, and they certainly don't originate with me. Where I fail to explain them to your satisfaction, please lay the responsibility at my feet. Conversely, if you find them to be illuminating and life-changing, that's because they already were those things long before I ever crossed paths with them.

Remember as you read that the goal of these words is peace. Sustained peace. The purpose of these insights is to help you to discover, or simply realign with, a way of engaging with the world that I believe offers greater access to peace and, ultimately, joy.

You can consider this process to be like taking a houseplant that’s withering away in a small, constricted flowerpot, where it receives barely enough water and sunlight to sustain itself, and replanting in your garden, where it will have the opportunity to flourish. The flowerpot you call my body or my individual personality was perhaps large enough for the seed you once were. But there's simply not enough room in it for your soul to receive the sustenance it needs to continue to grow into what it has the capacity and was destined to become.

This line of thinking is a well-worn path that, ironically, few people have traveled to the end. But I think it's worth exploring, and can well lead you to the peace that you seek.