I’m not a quiet person. I’m not a guarded person or a person who loves control. I’m not a high achiever or a modest achiever or any kind of achiever. Thought that was consistent with some of those qualities moved through me in the past, and I identified with it and acted accordingly. But that
We think we’re supposed to have a thing. Maybe your thing is being funny. Or that you have been through a lot and you come out stronger, or that you’re really good at your work. Young people are notorious for looking for their thing, as their mind scrambles to settle into some identity that will
“Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”–Joseph Campbell Practically everyone I know feels like something is a little bit off. Like they’re out of the
One of the LSBC students in the 6-week course saw something very clearly in our first week in class. She said, “Even though we didn’t really talk about this, for some reason it clicked with me that all of my behaviors are rooted around various fears.” She went on to list half a dozen imagined
The old paradigm implies that we are our psychological experience. We are the sum of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We are the “me” identity our left-brain interpreter constructs for us. We have a personality that is stable and meaningful, that tells the world who-we-are. The new paradigm couldn’t be more different. In the new
You are life. You aren’t a separate me who has a life, as if you’re outside of life, owning some little corner of it. There are no corners. There is no separation and so there is no one to own anything. You and life are one in the same. Life wants to live. I mean,
As Linda woke up to the fact that her mind was trying to help her, but that its conclusions were not accurate or helpful, she was less fooled by it. She saw the wisdom in her habit. She realized that she didn’t have a hard time kicking the wine habit because she was weak or
The only thing ever going on when there is any bit of discomfort or discontent is this: a thought believed. Thought arises and is viewed as all-there-is. There is never anything else going on. Thought arises and is viewed as truth. That’s it. It is that simple, but here’s why it won’t feel so simple:
When we think our experience is all there is, we’re often afraid to look at it. When it feels uncomfortable or dangerous and true and personal, we numb. We avoid. We look away. We distract ourselves from our experience of life in countless ways, like staying chronically busy, needing to be surrounded by people or
I talked with Clare Dimond a few weeks ago about this quote from The Little Book of Big Change: “Your habit is not “you” and it is not personal. It is simply your brain doing what it does.” We dissected this quote line by line. Your habit is not “you”. Of course it isn’t. Who
