Category: Inside-out

When Your World Feels Small…Say Yes

When I was struggling with anxiety, my world was tiny. I went to class, but only when there was an open seat right by the door. I can’t tell you how many times I walked by the classroom, saw that the only open seats were way across the room, and kept walking.  I went to the grocery

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A Step Behind or a Step Ahead?

When I talk about leaning into everything that arises with curiosity, it’s a little like watching a dramatic movie scene with no musical soundtrack telling you how you’re supposed to feel.  The dramatic soundtrack may be playing, but your curiosity allows you to see that as a lens rather than as reality.  When you’re exploring what’s arising

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The Tip Off

There is an incredibly clear way life shows you that you’re seeing things through a thick and biased filter of thought. It shows you through discomfort. When you’re feeling things like resistance, self-consciousness, guilt, regret, shame, or anxiety, you’re identified with experience as if it’s “yours”; as if you’re a separate “me” to whom life is happening. Rumi

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No Need to Devour

There’s a worm addicted to eatinggrape leaves.Suddenly, he wakes up,call it grace, whatever, somethingwakes him, and he’s no longera worm.He’s the entire vineyard,and the orchard too,the fruit, the trunks,a growing wisdom and joythat doesn’t needto devour.–This is How a Human Being Can Change by Rumi The worm doesn’t break his grape leaf addiction by cutting out

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Separation is dangerous. Good thing it’s not real.

Everything you experience and everything you see in the world around you is filtered through the often invisible, yet incredibly powerful lens of me-and-my-life. For starters, it looks like there is a you, separate from life, having a life. It looks like there is a you, separate from life, to whom good, bad, wanted and unwanted

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Time is Thought

A habit or ongoing problem, by definition, requires memory. It requires a brain that pulls ideas, concepts, and memories through time and draws sweeping conclusions about them. A brain that says, “This thing happened in the past, so I assume it’ll happen again in the future.” Without a past and future conversation, there’s just Now. Anything that’s

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Life Is Change

It can look like we’re responsible for making things happen. Life looks like our responsibility. Our outcomes, including our own peace of mind, happiness, and anything we want to change, appear to be up to us to figure out. But what if change is not up to us? What if human minds love to take credit for things,

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Attachment to Ideas is Supposed to Hurt

Suffering is feedback, showing us that we’re attached to ideas and thoughts that appear true, but aren’t. For example, when you believe you’re not good enough or life should be other than how it is, you suffer. That suffering is alerting you to your identification with a fleeting, false idea. Like suffering, habits and anxiety are

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A Watched Pot Boils (it Just Feels Like it Doesn’t)

We’ve been led to believe that our thoughts and feelings are ours to manage and control. At the very least, most people believe there are things we can do to help our mind relax or to help ourselves feel better. But what if thoughts and feelings change completely on their own, all the time? You couldn’t stop

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Subtraction, Not Addition

Continue to see thought for what it is. It’s the always-on narrator in your mind that is very opinionated and full of problems and solutions. But that narrator is not you and the narration is not the truth.  There is a healthy, happy, free space beyond the narration. There is an awareness or space within which

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