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  • Home
  • About
    • The Happy Fan Club
  • Private Coaching
  • LET'S CONNECT!
  • Blog
    • Live Free Your Way
    • Seeing Things Differently
    • Mistaking Assumptions for Truth
    • How Humor Keeps Us Sane
    • Know Thyself
    • Peach Pie for Breakfast
    • Explore Experience Express
    • Should You Be Downshifting?
    • Stop the Hustle!
    • Do Your Habits Serve or Sabotage
    • Settle Down? Down Where?
    • What Lights You Up?
    • Saying Yes When Your Mind Says No
    • Independence From What?
    • Letting Ourselves Off the Hook
    • Letting Go of Assumptions
    • Is Kindness Allowed?
    • How to Throw a Wrench in the Works
    • Happiness
    • Daring to be Lighthearted
    • What Happens When You See Things Differently
    • Find Delight in Everyday Life
    • Are You Saying What Needs to Be Said
    • Is Your Life in Alignment
    • Are You Trapped by Your Past
    • Can You Love Your Life
    • The Hallmark of Creativity
    • Out Of Ideas?
    • Waking Up to a New World
    • Are You a Possibilitarian?
    • Want to Love Your Life?
    • Is Creativity Necessary
    • What's Stopping You?
    • An Unexpected Discovery
    • Free Your Mind
    • Is Your Creative Genius Hiding
    • Empty Headed or Clear Minded?
    • Is Stress Really Necessary?
    • Will Creativity Improve Your Life?
    • Is Creativity In Your Future?
    • Replace Fear With Love
    • How to Get Out of Your Own Way
    • Just Take A Moment
    • You Don't Have To - You Get To
    • The Good News About Being Stuck
    • Interested in Inner Freedom?
    • Are You a Hoarder?
    • What Remains
    • Co-vid 19 Free Pass to the Roller Coaster
    • Grace Under Pressure
    • Now is the Time To Notice
    • Hanging With the Wrong Crowd
    • Make Your Life Simpler
    • What Could Be Different For You
    • Everything is a Miracle
    • Do You Have A Negativity Bias
    • Are You Really Seeing Or Just Assuming?
    • Happiness and Resilience
    • Wherever You Go, There You Are
    • Is Stress Making You Sick?
    • What I Wish My Humans Knew
    • Looking Backwards
    • Daring to Change Course
    • Lost in Thought or Taking Action?
    • Still Can't Focus?
    • Do Your Thoughts Get Dark and Gloomy?
    • Can't Focus?
    • An Instant Formula for New Ideas
    • Talk Yourself Out of Another Great Idea?
    • Is Your Busyness Keeping You From Getting Things Done?
    • What's that Feeling In the Pit of My Stomach?
    • How Cool is This?
    • How to Make Your New Year Happier
    • Why Be Open To Life?
    • Simple Ways to Transform Your Life
    • Get Clarity and Confidence
    • Are You Driven by Fear or Love?
    • The Number One Way to Keep Your Vision Alive and Well
    • Why Stop Trying to Figure it Out?
    • What Are You Trying to Prove?
    • Do Your Goals Reflect Your Hearts Desire
    • Why My Cat is My Spiritual Teacher
    • Surviving the Holidays
    • 3 Convincing Reasons
    • 3 Secrets to Enjoying the Holidays
    • 5 Quick Steps to Get Your Mojo Back
    • 3 Ways to Keep Your Energy High
    • 5 Reasons to Do Good
    • Pain Relief for the Soul
    • Tired of Living by the Rules? Go Rogue!
    • What? You've Made a Mess? Excellent!
    • Why You Need to Be Inspired Now
    • Change Your Life in Just 48 Hours?
    • The Cure For Mental Overload
    • 5 Infallible Ways to Stay Inspired

Mistaking Assumptions for Tuth

10/9/2021

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​(This blog recently appeared in Medium.com).

It can feel a little scary to acknowledge what might appear to be failure, but being willing to explore the nature of that so-called failure revealed something that changed my entire way of seeing the world. And if that can be true for me, it can for you, too.

It took me a long time to make the connection between unmet goals that I had set for myself (to say nothing of the ones that were never even begun) with the feelings of depression and self-doubt that used to consume me.

In searching for the “reasons” why I went through periods of depression, I assumed some of the cause had to do with the fact that my father had his first heart attack when I was 10 and after 4 consecutive years of more heart attacks, died from a stroke when I was 15.

I also factored into the equation the fact that my mother shared too much of her own emotional trauma with me.

Those events colored my perspective, as you might imagine. Beyond my personal history, I also assumed that there were other factors at play: my circumstances, my genes, my voracious self-judgment or maybe even karma.
To find a “cure” for my depression, I studied spirituality, psychology, energy medicine, and several other disciplines.

I collected a lot of practices designed to minimize my all-too-frequent giving up or never following through on dreams that I harbored in secret.

I ended up with plenty of certificates and credentials but the fundamental cause of my lack of follow-through still remained elusive.

My life was far from a failure: I had some great jobs with talented people and exciting opportunities. Sometimes I amazed myself and accomplished things I never thought possible.

Other times, I could hardly get off my couch and everything that I wanted to do seemed hopelessly out of reach.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized why all those practices and affirmations didn’t help me in the way I’d hoped for.

I was attributing the cause of my suffering to the wrong source. This recurring depression was a result of my own thoughts and the feelings that went with them.

My depression wasn’t due to external causes like people or genes or circumstances or personal history. For all those years, I had believed that those depressing thoughts and feelings were the truth. I believed that they meant something bad or wrong about me.

I had somehow managed to overlook the fact shared in the spiritual traditions that my true nature (prior to all that noise in my head) is one of happiness, peace, and possibility. In more psychological terms, it’s referred to as innate well-being or innate mental health.

This ground of being is beneath all the thinking and feeling that passes through us.

When we’re not hijacked by our thoughts and feelings, we naturally return to this peaceful, at-rest state within ourselves.

This is true for every single human on the planet. We all have this experience, often without knowing it for what it is.

The more I was able to settle into this natural state, I saw how I’d been creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by believing those dark thoughts. All those techniques that I’d learned gave “my” depression a solidity that required doing something about — like improve, replace or get rid of them.

But the miraculous fact that our true nature exists means that when I put my attention there I don’t need to do anything to the dark cloud of thoughts and feelings I referred to as depression.

​I can acknowledge their coming and going and the mood that goes with them without identifying with them and without losing my sense of wholeness and well-being.
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