It was maybe my most meaningful gig ever. Sharing ‘how we work’ with a troop of 9-year old Girl Scouts. I asked so many questions. What do they know about their thoughts, feelings, and why they do the things they do? Where do feelings come from? How do they know things? Not the things they […]
I knew someone with a very sensitive stomach. The tiniest bit of worry and she’d instantly feel sick. She cursed her stomach. Saw it as a weakness, a flaw. She wanted her stomach fixed. Her mind was full of potential ways I might help her toughen up her wimpy tummy. Could we train it to […]
Feeling unhappy is a habit. What else could it be? It’s not your nature. It’s not a feature of your conditions or surroundings. It’s not dictated by your DNA. It’s simply where your mind goes. You unknowingly picked it up at some point, the way you unknowingly pick up an accent or a virus. It’s […]
There are a few students in The Little School of Big Change who experience panic in large crowds. We’ve been exploring this on our forum. The LSBC students have seen quite a bit about where their experience comes from. They have gotten personally curious about who they are—they aren’t anxious; they aren’t afraid of people. […]
I’m not typically sad. Of course I experience up and down moods like anyone, but depressed isn’t a feeling that visits very often. Except for this past summer. Off and on, here or there. There was a depth to my moods that I can’t remember experiencing in the past. A flat feeling that I recognized […]
Your brain is an appliance. A physical apparatus. It’s a little like the Play-Doh Fun Factory (which is modeled after a pasta maker in case you aren’t familiar). You select an extruder plate (an extruder plate is one of those things that looks like a stencil with shapes cut out) to place over the opening. […]
I recently wrote the foreword to Jill Whalen’s new book, Victim of Thought: Seeing Through the Illusion of Anxiety. Victim of Thought tells Jill’s story of finding freedom from something she didn’t know was a problem. Which is kind of interesting, isn’t it? Finding peace and freedom that you didn’t know you didn’t have? […]
Life moves through you. It powers you. Imagine a kaleidoscope sitting in a dark corner of a shelf. With no light moving through, it’s just a pile of plastic. Then someone picks it up, puts it to their eyes, and turns toward the window. Stuff! Shapes and colors are brought to life by the […]
It can look like people don’t change. Or at the very least, like they don’t change easily. That’s not true though. We are constantly changing, naturally and effortlessly. We are wired for change. Our understanding of life is constantly evolving—just look at how radically and naturally your world view and understanding has changed from the […]
People I’m working with for the first time often wonder why they didn’t experience deep, lasting change in the past despite the fact that they did ‘all the right things’. They talked to the right people about their problems. They paid the money and put in the time and effort. In the case of anxiety, […]
