Someone asked me, “How can I have a healthy relationship if I had no good role models?” The first thing to do is to cultivate a healthy relationship with yourself.
When someone says “self esteem” –– and this goes for “confidence” too, because people often talk about these things as if they’re things, as if they’re substances –– I point out that there’s no such thing as “self esteem.” It’s not a thing you’ve acquired. It’s just a label for an activity we’re doing.
We human beings have an amazing capacity to form positive mental habits. Every day we have innumerable opportunities to change the channel. We can shift from a fearful state of self doubt to an empowered state of peace and happiness.
Do you start and end your day immediately thinking about your “To Do” list or your “To Avoid” list or a mix of both? If so, you may have gotten used to a constant level of stress or anxiety and a speedy thinking mind, jumping form one line of thought to another: “I absolutely have to finish that report today” .
Wouldn't it be nice if you knew an Easy Way to Escape from the painful struggle of second-guessing yourself? You can do it.
I was very moved recently when I watched a video clip from a talk by David Foster Wallace. In it, he presents valuable insights about directing our mindfulness and focus so that we can become the masters of our life experience.
Do you ever get an anxious feeling . . . followed by a fearful thought that something must be going wrong? Then the thought that something is wrong makes you feel more intense anxiety .
These instructions were created for people learning to conduct a hypnotherapy session to eradicate a client’s phobia, but you can just as easily use them to work with a phobia (yours or someone else’s) on your own.
Anger comes from a creeping sense that we are small and in some way lacking. We’re usually unconscious of this sense of smallness, but it makes us cling to what I call “lower self qualities.”
More than anyone else, my Buddhist teachers taught me how to relate to questions and questioning. They taught me the art of inquiry which led to what I now call Therapeutic Inquiry.