Hope, as we are discussing it here, is not "wishful thinking" or "unrealistic optimism."  Hope is a deep, uplifting feeling we have that things will work out fine, regardless of how they may look at the moment and regardless of whether they work out as we may have predicted.  People who generally experience hope are buffered from dread or disappointment.  The gift hope offers is that it keeps us in the present, accepting life as it unfolds.  It allows us to forget about our issues or concerns and just live.  When we get involved with our thinking about what might happen, we end up going in circles in our minds because we don't know and it's easy to slip into worst-case scenarios.  The feeling -- the attitude -- of hope, keeps us curious and open, without fear.

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Without intending to, we often put pressure on ourselves from trying too hard and seeking to achieve goals that may be unreasonable, which amounts to doing more and more and becoming increasingly frustrated.  Many "accomplished" people live on the edge of exhaustion and get no joy from what they do.  If we turn in the direction we want to go, and then quiet our minds and listen for our own wisdom, we'll see what to do, at what pace, and we'll enjoy the journey as much as appreciating the destination.

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Natural self-esteem is built into humanity; it's just being ourselves and embracing life.  Once we start to analyze ourselves, or become self-conscious about perceived flaws or worried about what others think about us, we lose touch with our connection with life and others.  Whether we think we're great, or fear we are awful, we live in insecurity.  We live in our head, not from our heart.  That doesn't mean we don't want to develop our knowledge, or take interest in staying fit or looking our best.  It simply means that we are born with all we need to be at ease with moment-to-moment life.

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The term "Innate Health" refers to the pure life energy that is the essence of our power to recognize when to turn away from non-constructive thinking and negative feelings.  It is mental well-being that is natural to us.  We lose touch with it when we get caught up in our thinking, but we can't lose it.  It is who we are.  The Principles describe it.  We determine whether to acknowledge it, appreciate it, and listen to the common sense and wisdom it offers when we don't override it.

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When we refer to deep feelings, we are talking about the quietude, inner ease, and sense of connection and appreciation innate to all people.  It's a feeling natural to us, our spiritual essence, unconditional love.  We sometimes try to attribute our deep feelings to things outside ourselves: people, situations or outcomes.  But nothing outside has power to "make" us feel.  The harder we try to find them, the farther we take ourselves away from them.  Deep feelings are not caused by circumstances, but awakened within us when we quiet our intellect and listen to our heart.

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Our life is a neutral sequence of ideas and events; how we think about life determines our experience of it.  So the details of daily living are not the "cause" of our felt experience.  Our thinking about them is.  We forget that, as the thinkers, we can "color" our thinking about life any way we want.  A lunch with someone we used to work with can be a light-hearted sharing of memories, or a depressing rehearsal of things that went wrong.  Remembering a failure can generate reflection about lessons learned, or a moment of regret or self-recrimination.  We are the "artists" who interpret and color our own life via the gift of thought.  Our memories, our moment-to-moment experience, and our plans look different to us in different states of mind.  So when we aren't satisfied with how life is going, maybe looking within rather than trying to alter the outside world, would make a big difference.

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We talk readily about being "the thinkers of our own thoughts" and because of that, being "the creators of own reality."  But it matters to realize the remarkable power of those facts.  We never have to live as the victim of our own most negative or distressing thoughts.  When people say casually how upset they are that they "keep thinking about" something that troubles or concerns them, they are missing the remarkable truth about our power TO think, the power we have to decide what we hold in mind, to change our minds, or to let it go.  What we think takes form as an idea which appears real.  But the life of a thought is only as long as we think it.  So reality shifts as our thinking changes.  We are never stuck in any "reality."  Our experience changes as our thinking changes.

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Some expressions we use are profoundly meaningful to us, but may seem like jargon to others.  One of those is "going deeper," the way we describe how to slow the memory-based activity of the intellect to allow quietude, to trust that insight will arise when we need it.  The benefit from seeing the Principles behind experience is not information, but feeling a positive shift towards living in peace and ease, trusting in universal wisdom and mental well-being as the essence of all us.  We become comfortable with the silence between thoughts, in which we remain in wonder, confident that new thoughts will come through us.  Going deeper is truly seeing who we are:  human beings with the gifts to create any thought and navigate our way fearlessly and confidently through the thoughts we allow to define our life.

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Those of us who work with the Three Principles often describe "shifts in level of consciousness" that awakened us, and that are the essence of change for clients who benefit from realizing the Principles that explain our life experience.  These shifts are insights, the source of change, and they arise from quieting our minds and trusting wisdom will come.  It may happen in a moment in time, but once people "see" the connection between our thinking and our experience, they can always look towards their innate mental well-being to find answers, rather than trying to figure out problems and get over negative feelings at the same level they were created.  As we let go of trying to figure out what's wrong or why our thoughts appear to plague us, we see the promise in our creative energy to leave old thoughts behind and naturally find the clarity and freshness to rise above old ideas.  The Principles point to the gifts natural to us that allow us to change.

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We make up ideas about ourselves, take on ideas others have about us, and wonder why we have different thoughts about the same things day to day.  We see this in others -- the girl with the beautiful voice who refuses a solo because she thinks she can't stay on key alone; the bright young man who never speaks up in class because he thinks he would be mocked; the grandmother who won't pick up her grandbaby because she can't stop thinking about a movie in which a baby is injured when dropped.  It is a comfort to us to recognize, as we see the Principles at work, that we are the creators of the content of all our thoughts.  We cannot be harmed by our own imagination; we bring thoughts to life and then we are free to take them to heart or ignore them.  The power TO think is our gift.  Thoughts have no power but the power we give to them.

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