Psychology Has It Backwards

Happiness is a natural state for all human beings; when our minds are at peace, we fall into a state of happiness with no effort. When we have innocently used our own thinking to create turmoil and negativity and unhappiness, the intention to turn away from our circular thoughts and quiet down takes us effortlessly back to peace and contentment. People expend a lot of effort chasing elusive happin...

Everyone, looking back on their life, can think of times they said or did things they regret, from hurtful remarks to physical violence. For some people, acting on their worst thoughts seems like a release from their own psychological pain and insecurity, regardless of consequences. Understanding the relationship between our ever-changing states of mind and thoughts allows us to maintain our beari...

We're in the habit of turning to "experts" to help us solve our "problems," yet we often find we can't act on others' "good advice."  The Principles show us why.  Problems look urgent and insoluble when we're insecure, in a low state of mind.  When our state of mind changes, when we understand ourselves as the thinkers and know how to find our inne...

Wisdom is universal intelligence, what we call "common sense." Everyone in the world is born into wisdom, the guidance and fresh ideas that flow through a quiet mind. It is natural to children; we learn our way out of it or start to second-guess it with our personal thinking as we grow up. Seeing the Principles leads us back to appreciation for wisdom, and the faith and confidence to rec...

When we begin to explore and discover the power of Mind, Thought, and Consciousness, we naturally change, sometimes to the amazement of our friends and colleagues.  Old relationship habits and patterns of interaction fall away for us, leaving others confused or worried about us. As we become calmer, happier, more caring, less self-conscious, more confident, those around us may try to pull us back...

All of us face changes, large or small, throughout our lives. Change means getting comfortable with the unknown as our new realities unfold. If we overthink everything, and try to anticipate the details of change and plan ahead, we can become caught up in insecure, circular thinking and start feeling inadequate, overwhelmed, incapacitated by change. When we stay calm and focus on the present, taki...

Consciousness, the power to bring our thoughts to life through our sensory system, is what allows us to know the experience of life we are creating. As we think, we feel, see, touch, hear, smell and taste what we bring to awareness. But Consciousness is also our spirit, our connection to the energy of life and the power of wisdom. As we experience  that spiritual sense more deeply, we quiet down a...

Personal thought is the use we make, individually, of the Power to think. It is the content we create for ourselves, then experience as our separate realities. It is unique to each person, and has no life beyond our own attention to it. When thoughts pass through our minds, the attention we give them determines how vivid or important they seem to us. As we recognize ourselves as the thinkers of ou...

Thought as a Principle refers to the universal power all beings have to create forms from the formless energy of life. It offers us unlimited potential to think, create, imagine, envision anything. It is the power that allows us to redirect our lives. When we talk about the Principle of Thought, we are not referring to the content of our thinking, but the gift we have to think whatever we want to...

Grief is a natural immediate response to loss or tragedy. But grief is really more about us than about the loss we grieve. When someone or something dear or important to us is suddenly gone from us, we feel the emptiness of a space no longer filled in our life. The natural remedy for grief is allowing our own wisdom to show us new paths for ourselves, and allowing our minds to come to peace so tha...

The more time we spend thinking about our problems, the more our spirits drop and the more "alive" our problems seem to us. With an understanding of how thought works, we recognize that spending time going over and over past distress or future worry is a surefire way to stay stuck in "mental illness." Principles practitioners get in touch with the innate mental health, always p...

People like the title of our podcast, but we want you to know we really mean it. The Principles represent a radical turnaround in the way we look at the assumptions underlying mental health treatment. The "mental health" field has been a "mental illness" field, devoted to identifying and treating the results of the innocent misuse of our power to think. The Three Principles des...

Moods are like our personal, ever-changing weather. When we're gray and cloudy, others can feel the gloom. When we're stormy, people avoid us, or react defensively. When we're sunny, we brighten every interaction. Once we understand that feelings are the atmosphere in which people relate to each other, regardless of the words spoken, we see when to remain quiet until a mood passes,...

Often, we feel like we are prisoners of our moods. We think our moods control our thinking, so we use a bad mood as an excuse for what we're doing or saying: "Don't mind me, I'm in a bad mood today." That is an innocent misunderstanding of how our own thinking generates our moods, and how we keep ourselves stuck in them by not realizing we are still thinking the low mood t...

We use terms like self-image, self-esteem, ego easily when we are thinking about ourselves. With an understanding of the power of our own thinking, we can see that none of them has any reality outside of our own moment-to-moment thoughts. We generate all kinds of ideas about who and what we are or should be. When we realize that our thinking is constantly changing and our ideas vary depending on o...

There's a "harder, harder, faster, faster" mentality that keeps people stressed and preoccupied trying to "figure out" everything in life. The faster our thinking goes, the more complicated everything looks. When we begin to recognize the power of leaving our frantic thinking alone and quieting down, the pace of life slows and we become more responsive than reactive. A qui...

Many people in the mental health profession (and others, too) complain about "burnout" -- the feeling of exhaustion, frustration and hopelessness in the face of their work. As people come to realize that we can't "fix" problems after our thinking has made them real to us, people are stymied. With an understanding of the Principles, of the fact that we are creating reality,...

This is an expression that describes where we are in our recognition that our experience of life events is created by our own thinking about them. As our level of consciousness rises, circumstances have less and less power to affect us. We know that we can look away from our personal, often insecure thinking about them, and quiet our minds to allow our wisdom to surface. As we come to count on wis...

Insecurity is a thought-created state of mind that creates feelings of self-doubt, suspicion, anxiety, alienation from others, discomfort... all kinds of negative feelings. It dissipates and resolves into increasing levels of security as our awareness of the role of thought increases. We all live in up and down feelings of security and insecurity, but as our understanding deepens, insecurity passe...

Looking at "fixing" the past, or behaviors, or outcomes to help people find happiness is really like suggesting to a sad dog that he just wag his tail and he'll feel much better. The Principles suggest a new direction; solve the underlying misunderstanding of how Thought works and how we function psychologically, and we don't need to fix anything. We see how to operate from und...

 Analysis is an overuse of personal thinking, and keeps us stuck with what we already think and know. Reflection is the opening for wisdom and insight, and allows us to rise above our past thinking and circumstances and create anew. Unfortunately, most of us have learned we need to analyze our problems to fix them, and we innocently hold them in place. Reflection brings answers and a change in dir...

With an understanding of the Principles, we can find forgiveness for ourself and others, and still maintain accountability. When we see psychological innocence, we see how people get trapped in insecure dysfunctional thinking that makes sense to them at that time. Once we understand that cycle, and learn to take such thoughts as warnings to slow down, forgiveness makes sense. Support the show

Our thoughts always appear real and right to us, even when they are contaminated by an insecure state of mind. If we act on thoughts we have without any understanding of our state of mind or how Thought works, we are "innocent" because they looked like our best choice at the time. We can forgive people, and still not forgive deeds. That leads to accountability without suffering and blame...

As we see the way we hold and use our own thoughts more and more clearly, we recognize addicted thinking sooner and sooner in the process. We find we have the power to let thoughts pass and the "need" to do something or use something to get relief from them disappears. We see that urges are just signals that we're starting to feel insecure. We're always just one thought away fr...

Addictions are a symptom of unrecognized, habitual, insecure thinking. When we think a lot about troubling things, we seek relief from the pressure and negativity of our own thinking. We become "addicted" to whatever we found that gave us relief — substances, food, sex, work, exercise — anything. When we catch on to our own thinking and the power of thought, we can let addictions go. Sup...