We normally think pretty much automatically, which is to say we passively allow ourselves to be ‘taken over’ by whatever thoughts come along. This doesn’t usually seem a problem until we find ourselves being plagued by thoughts that we do not like. When this happens we…
When we talk about motivation, and the importance of ‘being motivated’ there is immense scope for confusion here because what we don’t normally realise is that there are two totally different types of motivation. The key thing is not that we should be motivated (which…
The root cause of anxiety is that we treat something as a task, when really it isn’t a task at all. This way of understanding anxiety may not make sense at first but it will hopefully become clear shortly. Anxiety can show itself in a…
Thinking takes us outside of ourselves – it ‘leads us on’ by promising us something useful, but what it actually does is to pull us further and further away from what really matters. What ‘really matters’ is for us to be in touch with…
In our day-to-day lives we tend to be unaware of the fact that there are two totally different types of freedom. As we shall see, for very practical reasons it is important that we don’t confuse the two, but because of the lack of awareness…
If I am suffering from some kind of neurotic distress then the way that this is seen, both by myself and others, is as a problem that needs fixing. For me, the neurotic disturbance is a cause of mental pain and anguish that I want…
The key to working with anger is understanding the all-important difference between accepting and forcing. Accepting has to do with ‘seeing the way that we are’, and forcing is all about ‘getting things to be the way we want them to be’. So suppose I…