People Who Suffer

Chronic mental stress is creating an epidemic of mental illness and that makes perfect sense because it is the mental illness. It's completely understandable that so many of us are suffering with chronic mental stress and it's also completely unnecessary. 

We have really come to appreciate that living in the moment creates a more enjoyable experience of life than living in the past or the future. But what does it really mean? What is really happening? Why does making an effort to "be present" have an impact on our experience and how would truly understanding what's going on have that impact be profoundly simple? That's today's conversation.

You can mentally process thoughts, feelings, and events, or you can allow your mind to quiet and understand them instead. Both produce results. One is far better than the other.

People often have real resistance to believing that everyone is doing the best they can. But we/they are. It's called Psychological Innocence. We, and I mean all of us, can only live from our level of understanding at any given moment. Low level of understanding=pretty unpleasant experience of life. The cost of living disconnected from understanding can be really high. From brutal relationships to bad health and constant conflict and challenge, living from a low level of understanding can be extraordinarily expensive. Good news is that it's not that difficult to shift.

We find ourselves in suffering and want to find a way out. The way we choose will have a monumental impact on the directions of our days and lives. Understanding the difference between choosing pleasure as a way to feel better or finding a truer source of happiness is really important in helping us get what we all want. We all want to feel better.

My daughter Jaci joins me for a very impromptu conversation to help me with something I suffer with-a very bad relationship with social media. We cover this a little but end up straying all over the place. She's delightful and I loved this convo.

We worry and obsess over what people think about us. Of course we do. It's the natural go-to move of our identities. We judge ourselves constantly. We worry about others judging us. None of it is necessary or helpful to our experience of life. How do we get it to stop, or at least become less of a source of suffering? It's easy, actually.

The biggest barrier to experiencing pure emotional and mental freedom is the inability to comprehend that it's possible. It is possible. For all of us. Here are a few simple stories of how change occurred for people I've worked with and the value of that change in their experience of life.

Rejection can feel horrible. It doesn't have to. It can be a gift that opens the door to seeing what we couldn't see before.

This is a simple conversation around identity and the role it plays in mental suffering, along with just a glimpse into the unnecessary nature of that mental suffering.