When we’re ‘thinking all the time’ this has the effect of making us fundamentally insincere – it makes us insincere with other people and it also makes us insincere with regards to life itself. It might seem a bit much to say this but when…
What we succeed at can’t add anything to who we are, and what we fail at can’t take anything away. This said, why is it that we feel so great when we succeed and so very terrible when we fail? Why is it – indeed…
Ram Dass says that we give everyone we meet a present, whether we want to or not, and that this present is ‘ourselves as we really are’, so to speak. Our ‘inner state’ is the gift we can’t help giving everyone we meet We may…
Ours is a purposeful culture, and this inevitably brings a whole raft of neurotic mental health ‘conditions’ in its wake, which we then attempt to solve in a purposeful manner! The irony is lost on us, however. Purposefulness is clearly a healthy part of…
There’s this thing we do called ‘living’ only it isn’t living – it’s ‘bias confirmation’, which is actually a travesty of living. How do we get away with this travesty, then? How do we wangle it so that we get to believe that we are…
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…
Anxiety occurs as a result of the thinking mind projecting limits on everything and the thinking mind always projects limits on everything! This is what thinking is of course, thinking is that process whereby we impose limits or boundaries on the world – if…
The main difficulty with anxiety is that we generally try to solve it in ways that make the problem worse; we use exactly same approach that was responsible for generating the anxiety in the first place. The idea that there are some ways of tackling…
Mindfulness – we might say – is where we aren’t fighting with ourselves, managing ourselves, controlling ourselves, repressing (or ‘soothing’) ourselves the whole time. It isn’t quite right to say this though because when we practice mindfulness we don’t try to stop ourselves from fighting…
When we’re in mental pain, this pain – as we experience it – has a very precise relationship to our way of understanding ‘who we are’. To put this even more clearly, the pain that we are experiencing doesn’t just have ‘a precise relationship’ to…