Out of fear we try to make everything happen the right way, but fear also ensures that this can never happen. Out of fear comes control and control falsifies everything. Control distorts reality itself. Control can never do anything else apart from falsifying reality. That…
The thinking mind is ‘a machine for turning a profit’. It is there for solving problems, in other words. This is very useful at the same time as being (potentially) highly dangerous; it’s dangerous because unless there’s oversight with regard to the operation of this…
We’re all addicted to the ‘special experience’ that the system of thought provides us with – that very special experience which we take for granted every day of our life. This is the experience of ‘being whoever it is that we happen to think we…
Mark Twain is sometimes quoted as saying ‘worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe’. This just isn’t so however – if this were true then we would be able to stop worrying quite easily and we absolutely can’t. If this were true then…
One of the basic ideas in all anxiety management classes (and ‘anxiety management’ is not actually a very nice term) is that of challenging the avoidance of situations that provoke anxiety in us. This is fine as a far as it goes but we need…
Anxiety is never about what it appears to be about – this is fairly obvious since what we are anxious about doesn’t generally warrant the worry that it is evoking in us. If the situation that we are anxious about did warrant the degree of…
There are two ways of approaching anxiety – one way is to approach it with a whole bunch of tools and methods and ‘skills’ (which is of course the aggressive way) whilst the other way is with gentleness and tolerance, and no attempted ‘forcing’. The…
There are no effective (long-term) strategies for anxiety. If we can’t understand the truth of this simple statement then – very clearly – we just don’t understand anxiety! If we can’t understand that strategies and techniques and ‘tools’ aren’t the way to go then this…
At the heart of anxiety there are two conflicting things, two conflicting beliefs. One belief is that we absolutely have to be ‘in control’ in order to live well and the other belief is that (for whatever reason) we personally just aren’t able to be…
There is a huge amount of misinformation and obfuscation about anxiety going around – the self-help section in any bookstore in town is pretty much guaranteed to be full of it. All of our approaches to anxiety suffer from the fault of being far too…