Do not spend your life trying to improve other individuals in their personal lives. Do not know better than another what they should do and how they should do it. A need to improve others is your need, not theirs. Do not need to improve others, for it is always for your sake, not theirs. Furthermore, you only try to improve others because you have made judgments. You found the others lacking. You found yourself superior. You found your judgment and exalted it.

Do not always know better than someone else.

When you try to improve another, you invade their territory.

When you feel in the grips of something, in the grips of pain, perhaps, or in the grips of fear, or even in the grips of love, you have propelled yourself there and gripped that place, that occasion, that person. You attached yourself there. How crass of Me to say you are attached to even your pain, but attachment is its own pain. Attachment is false. Attachment is a conception you have, and — listen to this — it is never based on truth.

Attaching is its own art. You are skilled. You insert yourself. You embed yourself. You hold on for dear life.

My dear children, when you want something of someone, you are expecting something from them. When you want someone to do something a certain way, or be a certain way, you are trying to control. Control opposes. It is rigidity. Control closes down. You exert control. There is a force that exerts control. Freedom is not exerted. It is allowed. The nurturing of freedom opens to Heaven.

Others' expectations of you are their expectations. You can try your whole life to fill others' expectations and not fill them. You have tried. That is what you have been doing. You have made others' expectations yours, as though you were a slave to others' wishes and were obliged to obey.

You have not always been conscious of this. You thought your thoughts were your own, but many or most of your thoughts have been adopted. Better to adopt Mine.

When you were a child, you had to do what someone told you to do. You were penniless and dependent for everything.

One mode of giving is allowing. It is a great gift when you allow another freedom, when, on all levels, you let go of control. It is one thing to keep hands off, and a greater thing to keep your heart off. Your heart’s attachment can keep another back. Attachment grows tentacles.