‘When thoughts come, throw them away’, says Ouspensky. When Ouspensky says this he doesn’t mean that we should fight against our thoughts or try to control or correct them. If we fight against our thoughts (or in any way try to control them) this simply…
A good way to understand what is happening when we are anxious or panicking is to look at the difference between ‘noticing’ and ‘evaluating’ (noticing being where we are simply aware and present, and ‘evaluating’ being where we are trying to stay in control). Naturally…
We all tend to have an odd sort of relationship with our thinking in the sense that we tend to think compulsively rather than ‘thinking freely’. This is a point that may not immediately make sense to us, but it is nonetheless a point that…
The optimum thing any of us can do in order to emerge from the confusion and strife of everyday existence into the light of non-dual awareness is simply to be ‘with’ ourselves, come what may, through thick and through thin, through the good times and…
If life is an unfolding then where is the need for control, and where is the need for the black-and-white models of reality which guide that control? If life is in essence an unfolding then where is the need for definition, for regulation, for ‘management’,…
Mindfulness is said to be various things. Often it is spoken of as a ‘life-enhancing skill’, or in terms of a ‘tool’ that we can use to help manage stress or anxiety or anger. This tends to sound pretty good – who doesn’t want to…
Compulsions, or ‘unfree behaviours’, seen during the course of time, manifest themselves as a specific (i.e. limited) pattern of living. Or we could say that they manifest as a repeating pattern. All of us have a pattern of one sort or another, and usually when…
When we use strategies to deal with mental pain then what we are doing is postponing that pain. We’re passing it on to ourselves in the future, and so we’re really not gaining anything by the exercise. It’s as if there is a wrinkle in…
One reason why we find it so hard to shift anxiety (or any other form of neurotic distress, for that matter) is our fundamental lack of curiosity about what is going on. This is perfectly natural – if I am having an awful time, I…
The idea of vexation, and the state of ‘being vexed’, relies on there being two essential ingredients: [1] – That I want things being a certain way, and [2] – That things aren’t that way. This is so simple and so obvious that we don’t…