Category: Acceptance

The Fear of Failure is Actually Powerless

I hear people say they feel blocked. Stuck. Frozen in resistance. They want to act, but they can’t. A man in our LSBC graduate community wants to create his art, but every time he sits down to do it he feels a barrier of resistance. A woman in the new cohort of The Little School of Big Change

You Could Have Everything You Want Someday

A mind is habitually, universally dissatisfied. It’s dissatisfaction is about it, not about you. Part of its gig is to have nonstop conversations about more, better, could be, might be… A mind’s fundamental dissatisfaction is usually followed by ideas or strategies for how to be satisfied someday. Someday is the mind’s favorite promise. It complains about what’s

Sliding Between Extremes

The old paradigm in mental health is zoomed in.It focuses on our separateness as individuals. It often looks at our mind’s stories in an analytical way, analyzing what we think and feel rather than seeing that we think and feel.It offers a slew of techniques and strategies designed to fix, change, and manipulate how we feel. It

You Aren’t Your Thoughts, But You Also Are Your Thoughts

“You aren’t your thoughts” can be heard as permission to reject, bypass, or judge the thoughts, feelings, and inclinations that arise.“That’s lowly, fleeting psychology”, our mind wants to say in a judgmental way. “I’m not that”.And in a sense, you’re not that. But in another sense, you are.Talking only about how you aren’t your thoughts

There Can’t Be A Habit (Or Any Problem) Without Resistance

Problems come from resistance. There will be feelings of anxiety, uneasiness, depression, fear, insecurity, shame. There may be many of them. This is the human experience. These feelings can’t be a problem, they can’t cause problems, and they can’t even resemble problems when they are welcomed. Welcoming is the opposite of resistance and all problems come from resistance.One

The More You Explore, the Better it Gets

We aren’t looking at what all minds do for the sake of hanging out in thought and feeling—we’re looking at what all minds do so we understand it. And we’re trying to understand it so we can see beyond it. When we aren’t caught up in our experience, there’s space to feel what else is

When in Doubt, Feel

When in doubt, feel.Feeling what’s arising is the ironic way to suffer less. Yes, leaning into discomfort makes it not feel so much like discomfort. The resistance is gone. The hiding and fear are gone. Leaning into safe, perfect energy is all there is.When you feel, what wants to happen is happening. It’s a relief,

Things can Never be Different From how They are

This may sound like some overshared zen saying.But seriously.Things can never, and will never, be different from how they are. Not now, not in the past, and not even in the future.Life will only and always be exactly as it is. No different, no better, no worse. It’s a literal fantasy land to think that

You Don’t Have to be OK With Anything

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”

Hand-Me-Downs

I’m the oldest child in my family and the oldest of my 9 cousins, so I never wore hand-me-down clothes. I’ve definitely worn some hand-me-down thoughts, though. I carried around hand-me-down opinions and preferences for decades. I’ve adopted boatloads of hand-me-down worries, and lots of hand-me-down identities.Many of them felt familiar, like they fit. Like they had been