In the psychological sphere of things, forcing always comes from fear. In the psychological sphere of things, forcing is fear and this is why we can’t ‘force ourselves to face the fear’! Deliberately (or purposefully) facing fear is an impossibility, therefore; it’s a ‘contradiction in…
Only thought says what things are we think that things are – we assume things to be what they are defined as being but this just isn’t true. All we know are our labels for things and it is the thinking mind that provides us…
Being still is an art, not a science. Being still isn’t something anyone else can tell us how to do, and it isn’t something we can tell ourselves how to do either. Being still (or peaceful) in the face of life’s adversities is the greatest…
In meditation we allow everything to be what it already is. This isn’t something we have to try to do however – things already are what they are so where’s the need to ‘try’? This sounds very simple of course – and the basic idea…
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…
We can’t move towards Wholeness deliberately – nothing was ever more impossible than this! We can express this impossibility in lots of different ways, but they all come down to the very same thing. In terms of mental health, we can say that we can’t…
The thing about meditation that we don’t see at first – if indeed we ever do – is that it is not procedural in nature. We are not following some protocol or procedure in other words, even though it very much seems as if we…
Nothing the thinking mind does or can do is any help in freeing us from anxiety. We can’t think or strategise our way out of anxiety. We can’t utilise any ‘tools’ to help us overcome it – the reason for this being that the attempt…
When we completely accept ourselves as we actually are (in a conscious way rather than an unconscious ‘taking-ourselves-for-granted’ type of a way) then we become free. It’s not quite right to say this of course – we don’t become free, we discover that we…
How do we start to be mindful, how do we get started being mindful for the first time when the practice of mindfulness (whatever that might be) is not something with which we are culturally familiar? Even the intellectual understanding of what is called ‘mindfulness’…