Category: Changing your brain

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

No Need to Devour

There’s a worm addicted to eating grape leaves. Suddenly, he wakes up, call it grace, whatever, something wakes him, and he’s no longer a worm. He’s the entire vineyard, and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, a growing wisdom and joy that doesn’t need to devour. –This is How a Human Being Can Change

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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

Read More

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?

Read More

We Are Puppets

Our January guest speaker in The Little School of Big Change Graduate Community was Gary Crowley. Gary’s written several books. In one of them, From Here to Here, he talks about how awakening to enlightenment is the direct result of freedom from the illusion of the separate, volitional self. In other words, there is no

Read More