In our day-to-day lives we are constantly having to make the choice of either accepting pain, or rejecting it. In the first case we ‘settle up our bills’, in the second case we ‘evade payment’. Evading takes many forms, and it can also go to…
Impossibility often shows itself to us in the form of paradox. We can see this happening when we try to make ourselves ‘calm down’ on purpose – when I try to mentally calm myself then what I do is to split off a new layer…
We are so habituated to controlling that we try to apply it to everything – like Abraham Maslow’s story of the carpenter whose only tool was a hammer. For this lamentably under-equipped carpenter, says Maslow, the whole world is a nail. If the whole world…
It sounds very peculiar to say that there is such a thing as ‘weak strength’ since it sounds like a contradiction in terms but in actual fact this turns out to be a very handy way of thinking about things. Normally we confuse the two….
What helps with mental distress is having no kind of attitude, no kind of ‘approach’. The only thing that helps is having no attitude! Anything else merely adds to the distress. This needs to be emphasized because we are so convinced to the contrary –…
When ‘negative’ or distressing thoughts arise, or when our thoughts start becoming agitated or speeded up, then this is always because of some sort of ‘inner pain’ that we are not directly aware of. This is always the case – the negative or racing thoughts are…
There are a number of different ways of explaining anxiety. One way is to say that anxiety is what happens when we try to solve a problem that can’t be solved. This is a very simple approach to anxiety, and it is also very helpful….
When it comes down to it, in practice, we find that it is a very hard thing to work in a helpful way with our thoughts. What almost always happens is that we either end up fighting (in a perfectly futile way) against our thinking,…
A very rough-and-ready way to define anxiety is to say that when I am anxious I am unsuccessfully struggling to prevent something bad happening. It is important to add the word ‘unsuccessfully’ because if I was able to successfully struggle against the thing that I…
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…