When events leave people feeling hopeless or afraid, the inclination we have is to share our fear, or to follow people who feel the same.  Yet we know deep down that hopelessness and fear do not solve problems or inspire solutions.  Events have no power to make feel bad or good -- how and what we THINK about events creates our feelings.  As the thinkers, we always have the power to clear our heads and find fresh thoughts.  When things are difficult or confusing, we still have wisdom within us.  If we look towards our innate wisdom, we see what we can do to be helpful, not hopeless.

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"Panic" crops up a lot in conversation. "I realized I forgot to finish that report and I panicked."  "Tests always induce panic in me."  "She panicked when her brother uncovered her secret."  The actual experience of panic -- racing heart, shaking,  sweaty palms -- is unpleasant.  We tend to think events and things induce that feeling in us.  But panic is just the feelings arising from the build-up of distressing thinking.  It's an alarm waking us up to a flood of non-constructive thoughts.  As soon as we're onto ourselves and quiet our minds, the feeling of panic dissolves.

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Most people are taught that productivity makes us feel good about ourselves, proud of our efforts.  It gets linked to well-being.  In truth, when we're not at peace with ourselves, we can't force productivity and if we do a lot of work, it usually leaves us tired and depleted.  When we are at peace in our own minds, feeling at ease and connected to the moment, we are naturally productive because we are focused on what we’re doing, not on ourselves and trying to feel better.

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Because thinking is how we make our way through life, we don't realize that we are always making a choice which thinking to follow and which thinking to turn away from.  When we get caught up in negative thinking, and keep focused on it to try to get out of it, we are innocently holding it in place.  That leads to defining ourselves as negative.  We come to expect it.  With understanding of how thought works, we can decide to quiet down and turn away from those thoughts.  As soon as we look in a new direction, new thoughts occur to us.  It's natural to change.

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Why does it matter that we know we are always creating our own experience of life and that only our thinking generates our reality.  No two people create the identical experience.  Realizing this provides us valuable information about how to sidestep disagreements, how to understand other people better, and how to "read" our own and others' moods and reactions.  When we know that thinking is a creative power, we recognize it is a spiritual gift that allows us to change, and find fascination with, rather than reaction to, others' realities.

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"Ego" is whatever we think about ourselves.  Believing those thoughts can result in acting on idiotic ideas.  Such thoughts are illusions we create about what we are or how we should be.  Our thoughts appear real as we're thinking them, but they are no more than illusions we have created.  There is no need to be frightened by illusions that will disappear as soon as we stop thinking them and turn our thoughts elsewhere.  We all live in the same reality, but our experience of it is how and what we think it is, unique to us moment-to-moment.  Recognizing ego-thoughts for what they are -- just fleeting images we are making up in our own minds -- helps us not to become discouraged or frightened by negative thoughts we have about ourselves, and not to become arrogant or boastful about positive thoughts we have about ourselves.  We are all just human beings using the gift of the Principles to think our way through life.  Because thoughts are illusions, images passing through our minds as we create them, we are not prisoners of our own thinking.  We're always just a thought away from creating a different experience.

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People often think that the Principles explain why we are tempted to act on negative past thoughts when they come to mind.  We try to assign blame, or rationalize that we were insecure at the time.  We engage our intellect (our memories) to see how/why thinking and behaviors we wanted to put behind us came back.  We find ways to use the Principles to sidestep accountability and acceptance of what is.  We miss the possibility of going deeper and learning from fresh insight.  Yes, thought creates our experience; but when we are thinking a reality that we don't want, our true gift is we can let any thought go.  Our true guide is the feeling state that comes with thoughts.  If something occurs to us that gives us an uneasy, negative feeling, we know to stop; slow down, remember we are the thinkers and we have the power to take thoughts seriously or let them go.  The experience thought creates is a feeling state; that is what guides us to know whether our thoughts are helpful, constructive, inspiring, or not worth keeping in mind.  Every moment is a fresh start.

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It's true that the only "reality" we experience is created by our thoughts.  But it's not an excuse for acting on any and every thought we have.  We've heard people who have exposure to the Principles say things like, "Yes, I probably shouldn't have done that.  But when it came to mind, it was so real and compelling to me."  We can't forget we have free will to act or not to act on any thought that comes to mind, and we have wisdom to guide us towards or away from our thinking moment-to-moment.  It's important in the understanding of how the Principles work to see deeper than "our thinking becomes our reality."  That alone bypasses the fact that if the reality we're experiencing creates bad feelings, or doubts, or compelling but uncomfortable ideas that might be hurtful to ourselves or others, we can let those thoughts go and see the feelings they're creating as information that tells us we need to quiet down and wait for a clearer head and wiser ideas to come to mind.  Our feelings are a navigational system that guides us to turn away from low mood negative thinking and use our intuition (common sense, judgment) to make choices about thoughts to ignore and thoughts to follow.

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Many people struggle with decisions.  What to do, what to do?  The usual approach is to mull it over; consider all the options, think carefully, solicit a lot of information.  Our tendency is to engage our intellect in analysis of pros and cons, advice and considerations.  This kind of thinking is exhausting and frustrating.  For every pro, we can think of a con.  There are always new ways to look at an issue.  We easily forget to depend on the gift we have for natural insight and clarity: a quiet mind and confidence that from that state of mind, we'll get the answer we need.  We'll "know" and the answer will be obvious.  When we trust our innate wisdom, the experience of decision-making is simple.  We approach life with a clear head and recognize common sense when it occurs to us.  Experience with quieting down and waiting for inspiration when we face new challenges teaches us that answers will always come to us, and the feeling of certainty we get when they do assures us that they are right for us.  We all have what our colleague Christa Campsall calls "our guide inside" — the ability to listen for our own wisdom.

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People sometimes assume that if they really "saw" the Principles, they would always be happy.  The truth is, understanding the Principles that describe how we create experience does not lead to any particular emotional outcome; it simply leads us to accept the rollercoaster of life's ups and downs and the range of emotions we feel as they occur as natural and ever-changing.  We do not need to think ourselves into reaction to our own states of mind and responses to life events.  We don't need to "pretend" to be unaffected by negative events.  We ride the waves without worrying about them.  So, even when we are having negative feelings, we don't get frightened by them, or worried that they will never pass, or concerned that people will judge us.  Life, as Sydney Banks told us, is "a contact sport."  We're meant to take part and experience the thrills, the spills, the wins and the losses, the hurt and the joy as grateful participants in the experience of being a human being.  It's not necessary to fight our feelings when we don't enjoy them; they will pass as life continues to unfold.  Pain is pain; suffering is the way we are thinking about the pain.

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