We Are ‘Relief-Seeking Mechanisms’

The best way to get a handle on the idea of ‘psychological work’ is to understand what it is not, and what it is not is our normal everyday mode of mental functioning! This ‘everyday mental modality’ – which is generally the only mode we…

Increasing Perspective

What is perspective? Most people would probably answer that perspective has something to do with ‘seeing things from more than just one angle’ – of being able to get the true picture, i.e. not just a one-sided or narrow view of what we are looking…

Separating Ourselves From Our Thoughts

When we meditate one of the things we come to see is that we are not our thinking mind. We come to see that this mind is just a tool or instrument that we can utilize if we want to, but that we aren’t obliged…

Thinking Because We Have To

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…

Not Scratching An Itchy Nose

The key to finding freedom from compulsivity (which is where we very strongly feel that we have to do something!) is being able to hang out in our discomfort zones. It is the inability to hang out in our discomfort zones that makes us helpless…