It takes self-discipline and persistence action to achieve the goal.

A wilderness experience includes a long walk back.

Man in his spiritual pride has exchanged God’s method of self-denial for Satan’s plan of self–improvement.

I always make sure that the world will prove me right. It gives me the freedom to contradict myself.

Ridicule is often harder to bear than self-denial.

It was so quiet, I could hear my own breathing, loud in my ears. Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything any neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are.

I have now concentrated all my prayers into one, and that one prayer is this, that I may die to self, and live wholly to Him.

The Lord bestows his blessings there, where he finds the vessels empty.

The sacrifices we make to stay healthy, to look good, the tasty foods we skip, the guilt trips, the exercising - all these things require great discipline, care, and even a paradoxical, self-denying self-love of sorts in order to be properly executed. However it is regretful that so many of us today are not as passionate about our spiritual holiness as we are about our physical health. They are indeed both important - we should worship in every aspect of our lives - and one even, in a sense, entails the other. Although, this disproportion in said priorities is still very much expected: we humans have always taken a liking to trendiness and the temporal side of things, doing what is judged vainly in the eyes of man before that which is judged vitally and eternally in the eyes of God (I.E. 'cleaning the outside of one's cup while leaving a filthy inside'). But in a way, it all goes to show that the man who fully hates discipline hates himself fully; for within the spirit is where The Holy One judges true wellness or malady.

Never surrender your hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations others have placed on their own lives. The vision of your true destiny does not reside within the blinkered outlook of the naysayers and the doom prophets. Judge not by their words, but accept advice based on the evidence of actual results. Do not be surprised should you find a complete absence of anything mystical or miraculous in the manifested reality of those who are so eager to advise you. Friends and family who suffer the lack of abundance, joy, love, fulfillment and prosperity in their own lives really have no business imposing their self-limiting beliefs on your reality experience.