Blog | Dr. Amy Johnson

The Creative Challenge of Whispering Someone Awake

The type of learning that leads to life-changing, foundation-shifting change isn’t intellectual.You don’t need to be “smart” in any traditional sense. You don’t need good conceptual comprehension, a good memory, or to be able to retain or recall information.Those things may have mattered in history or chemistry class, but they don’t matter at all when it

You Can Feel Things Without Being Things

You can feel things, without being things.You can feel sad, angry, lonely, disordered or unwell without being sad, angry, lonely, disordered or unwell. The truth is, you couldn’t be those things if you tried. What you are doesn’t change. What you are is the same one energy that is all things. The all-that-is-ness within which feelings

Fake News

There’s a lot of talk about fake news these days. A good portion of what we hear is untrustworthy. Untested. Not just biased—flat out untrue.But what about the fake news in our own heads? So much of what we hear from our own thinking is also untrustworthy, untested, biased and untrue.My friend Craig Bissell recently pointed

The Problem of the Day

I had a close friend in graduate school. I’ll call her Karen. A few years before I met Karen, her mom died after a long illness. Because Karen was the oldest child (Karen’s parents were divorced), she was responsible for making some critical medical decisions on her mother’s behalf.She never knew exactly what her mother

Uncovery

I’d like to share a conversation with you.It’s a conversation between Amanda and Jeanne Catherine about seeing–despite decades of struggling and suffering–that you are actually healthy and always have been.Seeing that there is nothing to recover because the you’ve always been recovered. It’s more about uncovering the truth and seeing through the illusions that had

What Are You Not Seeing?

There’s a common phenomenon among students of this understanding I study and share. We’ve seen some things about life that have been really helpful. We’ve had insights that have made clear what was previously murky. We’ve found relief from suffering at times, and we’ve probably all had the experience of laughing out loud at how seriously

What it Means When Things Look Complicated

When anything in life looks incredibly complicated there is only one thing going on: you’re in your thinking, conceptual mind. You’re “in your head”, as they say.From our heads, we want to know how. How is the biggy. We also want to know why, when and where. We want steps, plans, strategies and guarantees.That doesn’t mean

Why you Might Be About 5 Days Away from Giving Up on Change. And What to Do Instead.

I bet you’ve tried change the hard way. Pretty much everyone has. The hard way is where you fall into one or more of these traps:You consider your habit or unwanted behavior a huge problem; it looks like a personality flaw, a weakness, or maybe even a disease. It hasn’t occurred to you that your unwanted

You Don’t Actually Have a Habit

You don’t actually “have” a habit. There’s no stability there, so there’s nothing to have.There may be consistency. That’s the definition of a habit—something that habitually, consistently arises.But there is no stability. Your habit is a thought that arises within you. It is not yours. You don’t own it or have it and it doesn’t own

The Power of Staying Where You Are

There is nothing in the world that can’t be worked out by taking things one…moment…at…a…time. There are no unanswerable questions and no unsolvable problems. There is no angst or anxiety. All is ridiculously well when you simply Stay Here and do what occurs to you in this very moment.It doesn’t have to be right or good