Without intending to, we often put pressure on ourselves from trying too hard and seeking to achieve goals that may be unreasonable, which amounts to doing more and more and becoming increasingly frustrated. Many "accomplished" people live on the edge of exhaustion and get no joy from what they do. If we turn in the direction we want to go, and then quiet our minds and listen for our own wisdom, we'll see what to do, at what pace, and we'll enjoy the journey as much as appreciatin...

Natural self-esteem is built into humanity; it's just being ourselves and embracing life. Once we start to analyze ourselves, or become self-conscious about perceived flaws or worried about what others think about us, we lose touch with our connection with life and others. Whether we think we're great, or fear we are awful, we live in insecurity. We live in our head, not from our heart. That doesn't mean we don't want to develop our knowledge, or take interest in stayi...

The term "Innate Health" refers to the pure life energy that is the essence of our power to recognize when to turn away from non-constructive thinking and negative feelings. It is mental well-being that is natural to us. We lose touch with it when we get caught up in our thinking, but we can't lose it. It is who we are. The Principles describe it. We determine whether to acknowledge it, appreciate it, and listen to the common sense and wisdom it offers when we do...

When we refer to deep feelings, we are talking about the quietude, inner ease, and sense of connection and appreciation innate to all people. It's a feeling natural to us, our spiritual essence, unconditional love. We sometimes try to attribute our deep feelings to things outside ourselves: people, situations or outcomes. But nothing outside has power to "make" us feel. The harder we try to find them, the farther we take ourselves away from them. Deep feelings ar...

Our life is a neutral sequence of ideas and events; how we think about life determines our experience of it. So the details of daily living are not the "cause" of our felt experience. Our thinking about them is. We forget that, as the thinkers, we can "color" our thinking about life any way we want. A lunch with someone we used to work with can be a light-hearted sharing of memories, or a depressing rehearsal of things that went wrong. Remembering a failure can g...

We talk readily about being "the thinkers of our own thoughts" and because of that, being "the creators of own reality." But it matters to realize the remarkable power of those facts. We never have to live as the victim of our own most negative or distressing thoughts. When people say casually how upset they are that they "keep thinking about" something that troubles or concerns them, they are missing the remarkable truth about our power TO think, the power we have...

Some expressions we use are profoundly meaningful to us, but may seem like jargon to others. One of those is "going deeper," the way we describe how to slow the memory-based activity of the intellect to allow quietude, to trust that insight will arise when we need it. The benefit from seeing the Principles behind experience is not information, but feeling a positive shift towards living in peace and ease, trusting in universal wisdom and mental well-being as the essence of all us....

Those of us who work with the Three Principles often describe "shifts in level of consciousness" that awakened us, and that are the essence of change for clients who benefit from realizing the Principles that explain our life experience. These shifts are insights, the source of change, and they arise from quieting our minds and trusting wisdom will come. It may happen in a moment in time, but once people "see" the connection between our thinking and our experience, they can always...

We make up ideas about ourselves, take on ideas others have about us, and wonder why we have different thoughts about the same things day to day. We see this in others -- the girl with the beautiful voice who refuses a solo because she thinks she can't stay on key alone; the bright young man who never speaks up in class because he thinks he would be mocked; the grandmother who won't pick up her grandbaby because she can't stop thinking about a movie in which a baby is injured when dropp...

As we grow up, we start to think about ourselves. We react to our parents' and other adults' expectations of us, and measure our worth against our performance. We watch people we admire and compare ourselves to them. The more we start to wonder how we're doing, the more we use our thinking to compare ourselves to others when we feel uncertain or insecure. Some people brag and "talk a big game." Some people feel more and more inadequate and either tell others abou...

The sign that we're overthinking is that whatever we're doing starts to feel difficult and we start to feel more confused and urgent. The more we think, the more we get lost in our thoughts. Often our life training, or our inclination, is to keep trying harder to figure things out. But the feeling of confusion or urgency that arises is a warning sign that what we really need is to quiet down, give our thinking a rest, and get a fresh start. It doesn't require a long ti...

We sometimes make relationships and communications more difficult than they need to be through innocent misunderstanding of the state of mind that facilitates good communication. Common communication problems are not truly listening, which happens when we're thinking about the next point we want to make or taking things personally and thinking about ourselves rather than listening for the point. To sidestep awkward or difficult communication, we can listen to the other(s) from a q...

Christine offers the metaphor of life seeming like a high-speed train ride. We settle down, look out, and take in the view as the train slowly starts to move. Then we experience the illusion, as the train speeds up, that life is moving past us. Suddenly, when the train reaches full speed, life is a blur rushing by, and we can barely take it in or enjoy it. Many of us spend a lot of our time moving and thinking so fast that we are always in a hurry -- doing the best we ...

Life, as Sydney Banks described it, is "a contact sport." In a contact sport, each player has great plays and terrible plays. Wins and losses. Injuries they cause and injuries that happen to them. No one can expect smooth sailing under cloudless skies every minute of every day. Our life is our learning adventure. Life offers us the development of new skills, the clarity to learn from mistakes, the humility to recognize that denying our role in ups and down ...

When people are in low moods -- such as anxiety, hopelessness, grief, anger, discouragement -- the immediate response is to figure out what or who is bothering us so we can deal with the perpetrator or circumstance that we think is bringing us down. That is the trick of our mind explained by the Principles. We are the source of our thoughts -- but as we experience thoughts coming to life, it looks like things are happening TO us. As we understand that we are the thinkers cre...

Optimism is looking for the best in people and looking for the beauty in life, and trusting we'll see solutions when faced with challenge. Hopelessness is insecurity about whether people will accept or like us, seeing risk or danger in life, and focusing on analyzing what is wrong when faced with challenge. Those opposite states are not the result of life; they are the result of how we are using our thinking to describe life. Hopelessness and Optimism are both habits of thou...

Over time, we take on ideas about who we are and how we are. We start to see them as our personality, our character. Maybe someone we respect has frequently referred to us as a hard worker. Maybe a friend has commented favorably on our looks. Maybe a sibling has called us stupid. Maybe a counselor has diagnosed us as anxious or depressed. Whatever "labels" have affected us become the story we believe about ourselves. Without understanding the way Thou...

We don't always realize that the only source of our feelings and experience about life is our power to think and our thoughts coming to life as our personal reality. So we often "blame" our experience on what other people say or think, or believe that we need others to say or do things to make us happy. The Principles explain that our experience is generated from within ourselves. When we see that we can change our minds and change our experience, we know we do not live at t...

It's natural for people, groups, nations to have differing ideas, and for them to believe in them. This only creates conflict, hostility, or anxiety when the people involved become attached to their ideas and take them personally. That can lead to polarization and hostility, rather than interaction from the understanding that every person's thinking looks real to them. If one party thinks "A" is the answer and another party thinks "Z" is the answer, the solution arises from ...

When events leave people feeling hopeless or afraid, the inclination we have is to share our fear, or to follow people who feel the same. Yet we know deep down that hopelessness and fear do not solve problems or inspire solutions. Events have no power to make feel bad or good -- how and what we THINK about events creates our feelings. As the thinkers, we always have the power to clear our heads and find fresh thoughts. When things are difficult or confusing, we still h...