I know someone who experiences some low energy, depression-type feelings fairly often and has for a long time.His experience of this has changed for the better over time. He resists it less than he used to. He believes his mind’s stories and judgments about “him and his depression” far less than he used to. He
Birds don’t know how to build nests. They just build nests. Nests are built as this thing we label ‘bird’ instinctually does some stuff.When it’s migration time, they don’t know how or when or where to fly. Wings are flapped and flying happens. Birds’ knowledge, their decisions, their ability, or their clarity have nothing to
Everything about our psychological experience is temporary, in motion, and relatively superficial. We feel impacted by it, no question. But the impact we feel is the moving, changing energy taking form as thoughts and feelings. It’s our psychology, our human weather. Those weather patterns move through us, we feel them, and then they’re promptly replaced
It’s fine if you’re not okay with what you’re experiencing. Really. Being okay with what’s arising is not a requirement. It’s not the ticket to freedom or the key to satisfaction or anything that dramatic. Experience doesn’t care how okay with it you are. Experience is just experience; it is thought, rising and falling. No biggie. And “okay with”
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 no longer looks
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 presumably keep
“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 CampbellPractically everyone I know feels like something is a little bit off.Like they’re out of the loop, didn’t
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 future events
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 paradigm,
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, it looks
