During a talk with a client, it occurred to me that, like many of us, she was a prisoner to the way she’d learned to think about herself. In other words, she’d spent a lifetime believing a self-image, that like all self-images had almost nothing to do with who she really is. It was obvious to me that believing this self-image, which had been crafted over a long lifetime, was preventing her from seeing who she really is now. And even more than that, it was preventing her from seeing the person she is becoming. After hearing her refer several times to this imaginary person she has always believed herself

I’ve always loved Thanksgiving, and it’s always seemed to me a much less complicated-feeling holiday than Christmas is. I especially like the point of Thanksgiving; slowing down to be thankful, and reflecting on just how many things, especially small things you have to be grateful for.

I dislike the term, “self-help.” The best help we can give ourselves is to recognize who we really are, underneath all the ideas we have about ourselves. Self-help material tends to reinforce the ideas we have about our identities, because they take the identities we create for ourselves and treat them as though they’re our real identities, as though they’re who we really are.

“Uh oh! I made a mistake.” When you have this realization, what tends to be your next thought? The difficulty we have with mistakes is largely a function of what we tell ourselves those mistakes mean. If for example, your thinking tells you your well-being has gone missing because you made a mistake, the experience of making a mistake can lead you to believe something is really wrong. But is it?

The assumptions we make on a routine basis are usually hidden from our conscious view, which is what makes them dangerous to us. We assume something to be true without knowing we’re doing it. If at some point we happen to become aware of the assumption underlying a particular belief, it’s easy to feel like a chump. In other words, it becomes clear to us we’ve been hoodwinked by our own thinking.

Whoever you are, my educated guess is at times you’ve been kidnapped by your own thinking. You may not have thought about it in those terms, but for a moment, just reflect on the phrase, “kidnapped by your own thinking.” When your thinking gets all revved up, and starts running away with you, and from you, what else would you call it?

It’s a question that almost anyone with a self-reflective impulse has probably asked themself, perhaps repeatedly: what am I here for? The question can seem like it demands a long, complicated answer, or that it might take a long time to figure out. There’s a simpler way to look at it.

Until I was somewhere in my sixties, I lived in a world where almost nothing was sacred. There were a few things that seemed to me were obviously, absolutely sacred, but they were far outnumbered by what didn’t seem sacred. That seemed obvious to me, too. It’s funny how what seems obviously true at one point in your life seems just as obviously false at another point in your life.

Two activities take up huge pieces of our lives, and both of them can easily fly under the radar of our conscious attention. The activities are seeking and resisting. Any time you dislike or resent what you’re doing, or the experience you’re having, you’re in resistance. And the strangest thing of all is what you’re resisting: life itself, life as it is.