Last summer I broke through YEARS of writer’s block. It started in college when I got panic attacks over homework and papers.

In August, I read this quote below from Mary Oliver, and decided to prioritize meeting with “that wild, silky part” of myself. The baby went down for her first nap at 10am, and I opened my computer and wrote until she woke up.

Through this season I learned to hear the difference between Mind and personal mind. I learned to discern between creativity and my ego. The next few months completely changed my life.

I hope you enjoy this little vignette.

Love,

Gabi

P.S. “Method Writing” by Jack Grapes also helped me access my deep voice, alongside these lectures by Sydney Banks.

Bottom of the Well

If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet–one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere–there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different–it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other buy are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.

The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem–the heat of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say–exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself–soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.

Why shouldn’t it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime. Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can life? But we do know this: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo. It doesn’t matter if risk is somewhere close by–risk is always hovering somewhere. But it won’t involve itself with anything less than a perfect seriousness.

Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook.

I imagine an old well in a corner of a garden. One of those wells you’d see in a kitschy painting: old stones embedded with moss and grime, with a weathered wood roof. The well is deep, and you can’t see the bottom. 

I’ve always been scared of deep, dark places. I think it started when I first heard about Jaws. I’m also scared of heights and falling. So scared, in fact, that it took me about 3 months for the queasy feeling in my stomach to stop when I laid in bed at night in our 4th floor apartment. 

I’ve avoided this well because the bottom is so far, so deep, and so dark. Just imagining how deep and dark and damp it is at the bottom makes me shut my eyes tight, shudder, and think of something else. 

When Mary Oliver referenced the dark, silky part of ourselves, I began to wonder if the bottom of the well wasn’t so scary after all.

The other night I had an image… the well isn’t that deep. The bottom is just out of sight, that’s all. And at the bottom it’s not dark. It’s actually a portal into deep space. I see an image that is some combination of one of the recent photos of deep space, with the sensation of speed portrayed in the bifrost in the Marvel movies. 

Creativity is the experience of sticking my arm in that pulsing, rushing river of the universe, and seeing what I come up with. Energy wants to come through and take form in thought. There’s no scarcity of energy ready to pulse through into form. I become creatively blocked when I try to control it. 

When I start out with an idea of how things should be or look, when I have an idea in my head and try to recreate it on the page, when I think whatever I’m doing needs to be commercially viable before I even go to the river to see what’s there, I stop creativity. I shut down that dark, silky part of myself. 

There is only what wants to come through. I do not get a say in what comes through or how it comes through, or what it looks like when it is formed. I don’t get a say in how people respond to what comes through. I can simply show up and experience being a conduit. If I try to control anything about it, it won’t come through. It will simply be a dead artifact of ego and its discontents. 

It feels scary to show up and accept whatever comes through. But I’m finally sick of the suffering that comes from being scared of the bottom of the well. I’m tired of resisting it. I miss the feeling of aliveness that comes from showing up and just feeling whatever comes through. And maybe, what other people think of what comes through simply isn’t my business. 

Love is love. What else could it be? 

But how do you know love?

Let’s start by asking, “What is truth?” The best way to know truth is to find someone who knows truth and ask them what truth is.

I found someone who knew truth. This is what I learned from him*, and what I see is truth in my own words. Don’t listen to my words… look beyond them to truth if you can.

Truth is what is. Everything that is not, is not truth. 

Truth is what is. 

What is, is right now. Everything that is, is truth. The past and the future lie in the imagination–they are what is not. They are not truth, but compelling illusions. What is true is my ability to believe those illusions, not the illusions themselves.

Beliefs and concepts are not truth. Maybe they came from truth at one point, but once they harden into beliefs and concepts, they are property of the imagination–the thinking mind. The thinking mind is truth, for it exists. But the stories it tells are compelling experiences, not truth itself.

What is lies under the beliefs and concepts. It’s the living stuff before concepts and beliefs. It is not the sentence made up of words, but the energy that made the sentence possible. Language is a tool invented to describe what is and what is not. It is not truth itself, but merely a tool to engage in truth and illusion.

Truth will never be the opposite of love or wisdom. Love, wisdom, and truth are all different ways to talk about the living stuff before thought. 

“But what do I do with anger?”

When I know truth, the proper way to relate to anger becomes clear. I understand that anger is a game the ego plays. That is not to say it is always a bad game to play. There are times anger points to something important. But if I don’t know truth, anger is a funhouse of mirrors distorting reality. 

“What is love?”

When I find truth, I find love. Seek truth, and with your seeking get wisdom.** Those who KNOW truth and have understanding can point the way. Truth lies within, I can find it within, but to see it I must first know that my beliefs, concepts, and egos are not truth. It takes courage to look beyond the “self” to find truth. 

On some level we all know love. Love is love. That used to confuse me. I didn’t believe it could be that simple because I had a lot of concepts in the way. The ego does not understand love. I identified with my ego, and so I created concepts and theories about love and tried to commit to those theories. They broke down, of course. It was not until I learned to look beyond my ego that I found understanding. When I understood, love flowed effortlessly. 

When I understand (present tense, for we live only, ever in the present), love flows effortlessly. When I am caught up in my ego–an illusion of self-importance–I temporarily stop understanding. I don’t mind that as much anymore. That is the game of peek-a-boo all humanity must play. But I’m more and more grateful every day for the little understanding I have. 

Big LOVE,

Gabi

*Syd Banks.

** “Wisdom is the principal thing; Therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding.” –Proverbs 4:7. The great cosmic joke is that we already have it–if only we knew to look deep within.

My husband and I used to have big fights over my intentions. He would get offended or hurt by something I did or said, and then I would explain my intentions behind it. He would feel misunderstood, and would double down on how hurt he was, and then I would feel misunderstood, and double down on explaining my intentions more. I thought that if I could explain my intentions clearly enough, that would take away my husband’s hurt.

When I realized I had a misunderstanding about intentions, navigating conflict got a lot easier. The point of good intentions is not to explain them to reduce the other person’s hurt feelings. The point is to have understanding and compassion towards myself, which helps me have more understanding and compassion towards others. 

Now I understand that the feeling in the relationship is more important than my intentions being understood. Knowing this creates a shortcut out of conflict for us. I can apologize even while feeling misunderstood, if that will create more goodwill in the relationship. 

I was not able to relax into this until I saw the innate health in all people. When I learned about my innate health, it blew my mind. I was very demanding of myself and others. While I could be nonjudgmental in a distant way, I had a lot of requirements someone would need to meet before I could experience closeness.

Some of these came from my fundamentalist upbringing, others came from things like psychology or relationship books. While the intention was to be helpful, they created a lot of misunderstandings for me around relationships. I got really in my head and thought I could figure out the “right” way to navigate relationships. 

Because I was so in my head, I thought I needed to rely on my judgment to navigate conflict, know how to make friends, or get along with my husband. My husband has a big personality, and there were ways I got insecure in reaction to him. I did not grow up with a good example of marriage, and I was determined not to be miserable in marriage. I’d rather get divorced! 

When it looked like I needed to rely on my judgment of my husband’s behavior, I was constantly analyzing it and his intentions. When I understood how the mind works, I relaxed. 

~

All human beings have innate health and well-being. Just like a body knows how to scab and heal itself, the mind knows how to recover and bounce back. We are naturally resilient. 

I misunderstood what feelings and moods were for. I thought if I was in a bad mood, it meant something was wrong. But now I see that when I’m in a bad mood, I’m just in a low level of consciousness. Wisdom reminds me that when I’m in a low level of consciousness, I create a low level of thinking, and that thinking doesn’t mean anything about reality.

I stopped trying to fix my moods, and started to ride them out with a little more grace. Even if I felt terrible, and knew I was in my head prolonging it, I gave myself a big break. Eventually I’d come back up.

But I didn’t see my husband’s innate health at first. We would get into big fights, I would get really hurt, and then I would spend a lot of time thinking about the fight afterwards. I’d try to see where we went wrong, I might stew in hurt feelings and resentment, I might make him jump through hoops before I could trust him again, and even if I could put on a fake smile, the day/date/weekend was definitely ruined for me. Sometimes I’d even try to diagnose his childhood wounds. Lol. 

One weekend we both partied too hard and got drunk. We got into another fight that ended with me sobbing with hurt feelings. He kept saying “You’re just drunk,” but I felt too misunderstood to give either of us a break. I felt strongly that I could not be happy in our relationship unless he changed, and I decided we needed couples counseling. So that week I scheduled a call with Angus Ross (of The Rewilders) to talk about couples counseling. 

At some point between when I scheduled the zoom call and when I talked to Angus, I realized my husband has innate health. I realized his moods do not mean anything about him or our relationship. And that while I wished he would get on board with this new understanding that was helping me, his innate health and wisdom were all he needed for us to have a happy marriage.

When I got on zoom I sheepishly explained to Angus that maybe we didn’t have any problems. He laughed and said that was the whole point anyways, and we had a wonderful chat. 

~

When there is goodwill and trust in a relationship, there is naturally a lot of grace for low moods. (That’s why the honeymoon period in a relationship feels so magical–there’s a lot of love and grace.) It helped me so much to understand that all I ever experience is my own thinking, and when my husband is in a low mood or says hurtful things, all he is experiencing is his own thinking too. When I saw we naturally rise back to a good feeling without effort, I began to trust good feelings to be enough to carry us through. 

I know this is controversial in a day and age of going to therapy to talk about your problems. I understand that impulse. What I understand now is that if an issue needs to be talked about, we both have much better access to our wisdom if we wait until we’re both in a feeling of goodwill towards each other. Creating and living in feelings of goodwill with each other becomes the primary objective. Problems sort themselves out as needed when we make this our focus, instead of trying to fix  the problems before moving in the direction of goodwill.

I’m not saying anything goes. Luke and I still have boundaries we established because they made sense. For example, even if we’re both in a really bad mood, and the fight is getting ugly, we don’t call each other names. And we are committed to keeping that rule. 

I just see moods, fights, and problems in a much different light. Transcending problems is much easier and leads to a healthier relationship than burning energy trying to figure them out. 

Good intentions look really different now. When I see that I had the best of intentions, and STILL acted like an ass, that creates humility. That humility is like engine oil in my relationship. Next time my husband hurts me, I’m less likely to judge his intentions because I know I can act in unthinking ways with the best intentions. He might just be moving too fast to notice he hurt my feelings. 

What makes our marriage resilient is how quickly we are able to return to a feeling of goodwill. When I see that, I have more access to wisdom and love, instead of spending all my energy on being understood. The truth is, once both of us are in a better mood, the whole fight ends up looking stupid or funny anyways. We get to the fun stuff a lot faster when we’re committed to the goodwill over our egos. 

We all have innate health and are doing the best we can with the understanding we have at the moment. In that sense, we have good intentions. But what really matters for a healthy relationship is a feeling of goodwill. Goodwill comes not from understanding intentions, but from deep feelings that goes beyond the personal mind and ego. It’s a deep feeling that is inside of every person (love, connection, peace, kindness, compassion).

The bottom line: when we stay focused on creating goodwill, instead of trying to resolve insecurities and misunderstandings, relationships naturally and effortlessly improve.

Big love,

Gabi

The answer is not in books. It cannot be written and it cannot be spoken. It must be experienced. This is what our group, if you want to call it that, will be about. We will neither be interested with the past nor with the future but just the here and now. 

We must forget what life has taught us and keep clear and open minds. We must not be misled by past experiences and thoughts. If we think and try to rationalize, all we are doing is stopping our growth. 

We are taught we must think to find a solution. In higher consciousness we find that things work the opposite way. After all, it is our thoughts and hang-ups that got us into this mess in the first place.

–Island of Knowledge, Linda Quiring

I am experimenting with how I relate to peak experiences. I realized that every peak experience was a moment of being completely present, beyond thought. I have experienced enough beautiful moments beyond thought to see they do not require any particular circumstance to happen. 

I had one walking to class across a hot parking lot during a time when I was the most depressed I ever was. For a moment, I popped out of thought and felt deep love and peace wash through me. By the time I sat down in class, it had passed.

I had one in a cult. I had one while camping. I had one driving in rush hour on the 101. As a child, I often stayed up late alone, and would have beautiful experiences listening to my Walkman, journaling, or sneaking out into the backyard to look at the moon. 

But for a season of life I forgot how easily these moments come. I clung to memories of beautiful feelings, thinking about them, trying to figure out how they happened and how I could make them happen again. I worked hard to “fix” bad feelings and low moods. I had no idea that was making everything worse.

All that thinking kept me from dropping into the present and feeling the beautiful feeling that is always available, no matter our circumstances.

I heard Sydney Banks say that it is like holding tight to the reigns of a stallion. If you looked up and around, you’d see you’re in a beautiful field that’s fenced in. Just let go of the horse. He will run free, and you will never lose him. 

Happiness does not come from looking for it. The search itself creates feelings of dissatisfaction. When I read “Beyond Beliefs,” I realized what it meant to live beyond all my concepts and thinking and beliefs. I saw that my true self had nothing to do with my thinking, and I was so relieved. 

I exhausted myself over the course of 13 years trying to define myself, and then make that self okay. It was like someone gave me permission to sit and rest after running a nonstop marathon for over a decade.

Today I feel so good. I still get caught up in thought, and think there is something I need to fix to feel better. And then I remember, I don’t have to search anymore. I’m home. 

My dear reader, you might think to yourself “This is nothing new. I’ve heard this before. I meditate. I pray. I read the Bible or other texts. My therapist talks to me about being present.” 

The best thing I ever heard was “Ask yourself, what do you KNOW?” If you are like me, you may think or believe being in the present moment is a nice thing. But do you KNOW it? Do you KNOW that in the silence is everything you have ever searched for? 

Look within. LISTEN. Not to your thoughts, beliefs, and concepts. LOOK and LISTEN beyond them to the silence. 

I really mean that, everything you have searched for lies within. I mean that in the big spiritual sense that the love, connection, and peace you crave lies within your own soul–you are complete. But I also mean that in a very practical sense.

We are human beings, not angels. We live in the physical world of planet earth. We have a spiritual soul and this incredible ability to be connected to God and other people. But there’s all kinds of stuff that makes up our daily lives.

I have ADHD, which has turned out to be a gift. It has forced me to look within for practical things like how to keep my house clean and get to appointments on time. Whenever I get caught up in what works for other people, I create a thought storm with a bunch of shoulds and suffering. When I look within, I find I have the resources to take care of whatever needs to be done today, in this moment. 

A while ago I heard someone describe what it’s like to allow negative emotions instead of resisting them, and it opened up a new world for me. It no longer looks like a big effort to feel what comes up, but it used to look like it did. Feeling whatever was coming up felt like sticking my finger into an electric socket, with no certainty that the pain and fear would ever stop. So better run far, far away from electric sockets.

I realized a few years ago that I had one big fear that ruled my life: the fear of feeling lonely. I was not afraid of being alone, but the feeling of loneliness was terrifying to me. 

I realized so much of the crazy making in my thinking and behavior came because I ran from this feeling. Over the course of a few years, I started to experiment with just feeling it instead of resisting it. While I was pregnant, I was able to go into it and feel it. During the next 18 months, going from pregnancy to the first year of my baby’s life, the feeling evaporated. 

Syd says, “If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.” As I learned not to be afraid of loneliness, my ability to connect with others deepened. I now see that my connection with someone is something I feel within me. If I am in a deep feeling of compassion or love, I can feel connected to anyone, no matter what their state of mind is.

The more I share this, the more I experience deeper feelings of love and compassion.

Right now I’m experimenting with strangers. Historically, I am pretty shy and reserved at first, even if I present myself as confident. So, while on walks with my daughter, I try to engage strangers a bit more in a fun and friendly way. It’s the most terrifying and exhilarating thing I’ve done in a while. I give myself lots of breaks to RBF my way through LA too.

Last week I was walking on the Santa Monica Boardwalk, pushing my stroller. I could see a couple in their 50s walking towards me. They were wearing matching overalls and T-shirts, blasting R&B, and basically dancing together as they walked down the boardwalk, making eye contact with everyone. They were having a blast! And they wanted everyone to see. 

I smiled and laughed and waved back when they waved at my daughter. Then I looked over at a group of skateboarders in their late teens/early 20s. They were smiling, and one of them was filming the couple. I caught one of the guys’ eyes and said, “Is that not the cutest thing ever?!”

His face went from slightly surprised I was talking to him, to shared delight and joy. In that moment, I could feel his delight deepen as I shared my own delight with him. 

(If you’re an extrovert, this is probably very obvious and easy to you. I promise, it is not to me! I really feel like I’m putting myself out there in a scary way! I’m scared right now just thinking about it!)

Something clicked for me when I saw the look on the guy’s face. This is what life is about. This is all it ever means to live in a deep feeling and share it with others. No matter my job, my circumstances, what I think about my body or my family or the world–this is available! Right here and now. 

Once I was willing to feel loneliness, it cracked my heart open. Instead of hiding and running in fear, my life is opening up in incredible ways. My relationships are improving. My husband and I enjoy time together more, and even when we fight and squabble, we recover much faster. I find more delight and less drudgery in the stay-at-home-mom life. 

It’s not like I float on a cloud. The point is not to never have a bad feeling again. But the feeling of love in my life continues to grow. I have greater compassion for my humanity, and as I am less demanding of myself, I am less demanding of others, which allows me to drop into a feeling of love and connection more often.

But I want to go back to what Syd said in that opening quote “We must forget what life has taught us and keep clear and open minds.” Old Gabi would have made a big deal about these insights I’ve had around loneliness. I would have tried to figure out a formula, and the more I spent time in that “figure it out” energy, the faster I would lose it. 

These beautiful moments come to us when we relax and trust. They show up in the present moment to be enjoyed. And just like we inhale and exhale, they pass. And sometimes we have a whole bunch of spiritual farts that just need to move through. That’s all okay! 

Inhale, exhale, fart. That’s my big lesson: I’m not so special that I never fart. Farts are fine. Just maybe go into the other room, and spray Febreze when you’re done, Gabi!

And maybe, in some way, those peak experiences will start blending into a very ordinary love and spirituality that supports my daily life. 

Big love,

Gabi

**I am always available for a conversation. Dm me on IG @gabi__fisher or email me at coachgabifisher@gmail.com if you need some space to talk or listen to yourself.

I live in Downtown Los Angeles in one of those old office buildings that’s been converted into lofts. I have huge windows with high ceilings, and from where I sit I can see down the street towards skid row. The apartment is on the 4th floor, so it’s not much of a view. Mostly I see some shops in the garment district and one of the LAPD helicopter pads. At night I can hear the sounds of the restaurants and bars on the street below me.

It’s nice being on the 4th floor. You’re not in the fray of downtown. I can hear the homeless person who walks up the street each morning yelling, but I’m not on the street with him. I can watch the party people, enjoy the music, then put in my earplugs and go to sleep. 

Most of us live on the street in our minds. Everything is up close and very personal. The person waiting for the light to change at the crosswalk is Very Real. They’re RIGHT THERE. The loud music in the tequila bar is all you hear when you’re sitting at the bar. 

We all have moments where we move up to the 4th floor. The street life is there. You can still see people clearly, sometimes you can see the expression on their faces when they look up. It’s like you’re a part of the city, but with a buffer between you and it. 

But have you seen the view from the roof?

The rooftop is a different experience. I see south LA stretch out before me, and on a clear day I see the Palos Verdes peninsula. If I peer straight down, I see alleyways and parking lots, and people walking on the street. But it’s so different. From the roof it’s just a city. It’s a network of streets and buildings, people and cars. There’s some street noise, but it’s far away and blends together in one background sound. 

I think it’s a gift when we see our experience from the roof. It’s a gift life gives to all of us if we slow down enough to notice.

This street corner might be anxiety. That street corner might be excitement. Here’s a shop full of  boredom. Oh look, the crazy panic attack is running straight towards you with a machete! (DTLA joke. You get it if you live here.) Here’s a little park of thoughtfulness. What a fun little eatery full of ideas and creativity! Ugh, this intersection has all my habits I don’t like.

We can get lost running around, trying to find our favorite feelings and avoiding the ones we don’t like. 

Sometimes we get our head up above the fray. We get on the 4th floor, and we’re able to ignore things a little bit, but if we look down, it’s there and personal again. 

But what if you, the real you, is that space when you’re on the roof looking out at the horizon?

When you see thought for what it is, when you see your chattering mind for what it is, when you see all the complexity and feelings and all the stuff that looks so personal for what they are, it’s like the view from the roof. 

And you know, it’s not half bad. It’s rather peaceful, even with the background hum. There’s nothing to solve or fix. It’s just the city being the city. Just the city doing what cities do. 

What if your mind is just a mind? It’s got all the peculiarities and particularities a mind has, but it’s just a mind. A mind with one job: keep you alive. It’s not there to make you happy, fall in love, experience enlightenment, or “be successful” whatever that means. 

You are here, on planet earth, because your ancestors were good at three things: survive, grow, and reproduce. You inherited their neurobiology. Yay you! You survivor, grower, reproducer, you!

And yet.

And yet…

We have this lovely gift of consciousness that somehow can notice itself. It lives in the mind and neurobiology, and yet somehow can step back and notice it is. 

What if that’s you? The noticer. The watcher. Not the voice in your head narrating what you’re watching. The view from the roof. The screen illuminating the movie, not the action taking palce on the scree. What if you’re the sky watching the city grow and change moment to moment, never staying the same.

How innocent to misunderstand and see the street life as personal. What a gift to see the view from the roof. 

**Just pause**

Look up. You see. You are not what you see.

You might have noticed these little practices at the end of my posts. When I share this understanding, I’m pointing to an experience that lives prior to words and language. Language is a tool we invented, and frankly, it’s a primitive tool when it comes to describing what we’re looking at.

I think the easiest way to know who we truly are is to simply experience it. Intellectual words can grab our attention and point us there, but to see what’s there you need to experience it for yourself

These little practices are a way for me to hold your hand as you look and see for yourself. 

Try them out and let me know what you think!

I got this one from my friend and fellow coach, Lexie Bebbington. You can connect with her here, and listen to her beautiful voice here. She’s brilliant.

**Let’s imagine**

Let’s imagine.

Let’s imagine you’re in a beautiful, clear, turquoise sea. Maybe Hawaii or Bali. You’re in the warm waves, and you can see the bottom. You see colorful fish, a beautiful coral reef, and seaweed swaying..

Then you notice a shadow. It’s off in the distance. It gets closer. 

It gets closer and closer until you realize it’s a massive Great White shark coming straight towards you. How do you feel? 

Scared? Terrified? Frozen in fear? 

What happens if you realize you’re the ocean? 

Pause and take in that feeling.

You are the ocean, you are the water and background experiencing all this amazing life, including Great White sharks. How glorious it must be to be the ocean.
You have a mind. You are not your mind.

As I explained in the last post, I went into a Christian cult looking for a way to preserve this incredible feeling of love and bliss I experienced as a child. The tool I was given was hypervigilance. That tool became a sort of algorithm of conditioning in my brain. A full 7 years later, I left religion altogether. I still believed in God, but I knew I needed to walk away from the form of organized religion. 

But here’s the funny about conditioning: it doesn’t need the original environment or belief structures to continue running in your brain. 

We know this on some level in our culture when we think about trauma recovery. We see a veteran having a PTSD flashback experience. The soldier comes home from war. He lives in an environment where there is no war. But the conditioning he picked up in a warzone is still running in his brain. How do we help the trauma victim heal from the trauma?

It’s been helpful for me to see this in a different way. It’s not that the original conditioning is bad. It’s actually a sign of health and wellbeing for the mind to quickly learn new conditioning in a high stress environment as a way of protecting us. It’s when there is a mismatch between old conditioning and a new environment that we see it as bad. 

The conditioning is neutral. It’s just a meme or code running through your brain designed to protect you. Yay brain! Thanks for keeping us alive from perceived threats. 

So what does this have to do with personal development? 

Well, long after I stopped believing the religious stuff, I still had the base layer of conditioning: hypervigilance. In particular, I was taught to be hypervigilant over my thoughts and inner life. If I wanted this nice feeling–and who doesn’t want to feel never ending joy?–I needed to watch my mind.

Here’s some of the verses I memorized to support this:

“Guard your heart, for from it are the wellsprings of life” “Take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” “Be perfect, even as your heavenly father is perfect.” “Now those who belong to Christ Jesus crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”

The funny thing about conditioning is that it needs to be very simple. It does not understand theological nuance. The conditioning I picked up sounded more like that Christmas song “You better watch out, you better not cry, because Santa Claus is coming to town.”

My song went more like this, “You better be hypervigilant so you can be perfect. If you do this right, you’ll feel never ending joy all the time.” I was explicitly taught that being perfect is 100% possible, as long as you’re in this special state of grace. You needed to be “in Christ.” When God looked at you, he saw Christ, and Christ was perfect, so therefore you would be perfect.

The road is narrow, we were told, and few find it. If you achieve it, you will feel the overwhelming love of God at all times, even in martyrdom and the most intense suffering you can imagine. You will then be a beacon of love to the world, and help more people live in this amazing state of bliss.

They might have used other words, but when you take all the things I was told, and distill it down to a simple algorithm a brain can process and execute on, that’s the gist of it. 

~~

I came into personal development for a very simple reason: I wanted to make more money so I could pay off my large student loan balance, and I didn’t know how to do that with a philosophy degree.

But of course I was drawn to the personalities who focused on changing your mindset, getting your mind right, doing “thought work.” My old conditioning was drawn towards what it knew. Sort of like someone who keeps dating the same person over and over again, wondering why their relationships always turn out the same. 

Instead of being a spiritual elite, I would become a professional elite. 

The problem was, I didn’t really like what I was doing. It was boring and required a set of skills I had no interest in acquiring. Not for their own sake, anyways, not for the fun and enjoyment of it. I was only going through this personal torture because I had some old conditioning that told me if I worked really hard monitoring what’s in my head, I could get what I was really after: peace of mind.

Instead of doing this list of spiritual exercises to protect my experience of God, so I could be a spiritual elite, I needed to pay thousands of dollars for coaching, listen to podcasts, and work really, really hard to monitor my thinking so I could be a self-development elite and “successful” and “wealthy.”

It’s funny, I came to personal development just so I could figure out how to make more money to pay off my student loans. That’s not super complicated. You get a job, keep more than you spend, and chip away at the loans until they are paid off. But with the old conditioning, I fell right back into hypervigilance and tried to control my thoughts so I could be “elite” or “good” at something. Which, in my mind, was how I got the nice feeling. I felt bad with the loans, therefore, paying them off at lightning speed would make me feel good again!

Old conditioning + personal development = hypervigilance disguised as personal growth

It was all very innocent and due to a simple misunderstanding. I thought my okayness came from being hypervigilant. 

~~

When I came across the understanding I coach from now, it was so simple, I couldn’t really see what was on offer. I was still carrying around this piece of conditioning, trying to insert it into these new insights I was having.

It’s really amazing how much has fallen away for me in the last two years. My relationship with my husband is so much more peaceful. We communicate more from a place of honesty and love, and less from insecurity. I left the career I was trying to build in corporate sales, and realized I really, really love growing marijuana. Ha! That came out of left field. 

My pregnancy was easy. It wasn’t just that I had a pretty easy time of it. Even when it looked hard and complicated and scary, I lived from this different place that made the whole experience okay. I still would experience bouts of intense anxiety, but it no longer looked like there was something for me to do or fix. It was just there as part of the process. The 15 years of chronic depression fell away totally and completely. 

In fact, the reduction in my personal suffering was so dramatic, I started to think I had something to do with it. See, even though I didn’t believe the content of the religious beliefs, even though I didn’t believe the content of the personal development stuff, the old conditioning is still in my brain. That’s how conditioning works. It’s supposed to be subconscious and undetectable. It works best when you don’t notice it. 

There have been studies on attraction that show men are attracted to women with certain characteristics in their eyes. It turns out, those characteristics correlate with youth and fertility. A man can look at two images of the same woman, but one of the images has been manipulated so that the eyes have these youthful characteristics. When asked why he thinks one is more sexually attractive than the other, he will make up reasons that don’t exist! That’s how good our subconscious conditioning is at going undetected. 

~~

As I have mentioned before, there is a mysterious kindness of life drawing us back to who we really are. Even the apparent suffering is there to bring us back to our natural state of health and wellbeing. Yes, the conditioning is there and real. And ultimately, it’s proof of our innate health and wellbeing. But we are not our conditioning. And for some reason, life would like you to know that. I don’t know why. But it’s kind, and it wants to bring you home. 

So life is bringing me home, slowly. I had a baby in January. A beautiful, perfect little girl. I was ready for this post-partum thing! I know how to handle bad feelings! In fact, I have this new understanding that helps me navigate things. 

BUT the old conditioning was still there, undetected. And it, oh so innocently, did its cut and paste routine. 

My mind decided it knew how postpartum should look. Yes, I would need some extra time to recover because I had a c-section. 12 weeks should be good, right? I’ll ease into working out. I’ll support my body with these healthy foods. I’ve already raised other people’s babies, so I know what I’m doing.

All of that makes a lot of sense. Babies are easy for me, and my baby is extra easy. She started sleeping through the night, every night by 8 weeks. I was able to go back to work part-time. I loved my job, and it was great to have a break from the baby. Sure, I wasn’t building my new coaching business like I thought I should, and some things would slip through the cracks with the household stuff. And oh…. My husband is now working 70+ hour work weeks, I don’t have any family who lives nearby, I had to fire my nanny, can’t afford the going LA rate for a new nanny….

And all of a sudden I felt like shit. I got my period. I had no idea that’s what usually happens when the baby starts sleeping through the night. My hormones went crazy. And we’re in the largest crime surge in Los Angeles in decades, so going for walks around the block in DTLA became a non-option. I don’t have an income, inflation skyrockets… Every week a new, horrible thing would be added to the list. 

Insert old conditioning. 

Hypervigilance + list of things you’re “supposed to do” = happiness.

~~

Once again, it was all very simple. I hated parts of my childhood growing up, and it looked to me that it was up to me to never repeat that experience. I wanted nice feelings. I knew I could have them, because I’ve had them before. I just needed to be hypervigilant over my thinking, so I could do the things I needed to do, so I could make it so I had nice feelings. 

But what does hypervigilance do? It stirs up thought. A lot of stirred up thinking doesn’t feel very good. It feels like exhaustion and overwhelm. It looks like collapsing on the couch and disappearing into my phone to escape my thinking for a few short hours while the baby naps. It looks like thinking I’m a shitty partner and mother because I’m not doing this massive list of things I should be doing, to get us the life we need to have, so we can feel good.

I’m not only making myself feel bad, I’m making the people I love most in the world feel bad. And if I’m just a little more hypervigilant about it, I can get back to the nice feeling.

OF COURSE I think take this understanding, slap on the old conditioning, and then drive myself crazy. That’s what a mind does. 

~~

Mavis Karn is a three principles practitioner who uses the phrase, “That’s a cool app.” She points to the wisdom and intelligence in our bodies taking care of us even when we’re unaware of it, and says, “what a cool app! I wonder what other cool apps we have we don’t know about.”

I’ve been “procrastinating” and feeling worse and worse, until I finally gave up on seeing it as a problem I needed to solve. Problem solving wasn’t working anyways. 

Here’s what I’ve realized. Hormonal systems are very sensitive to chronic stress, and hypervigilance creates chronic stress in the body. My body was giving me the gift of procrastination to help me recover from making a human being. What a cool app! It did the same thing in college. Back then it was burnout trying to protect me from this insane schedule I thought I needed to maintain to be a good girl.  I just saw it was this bad habit of procrastination I needed to overcome because I had some old conditioning. 

Religion and the cult of self-improvement taught me to gaslight the wisdom of my body. But life was too kind to let that go on forever. 

~~

Know what’s amazing? My baby started teething last week. My easy baby needs me to hold her, comfort her, and do silly faces all day. She doesn’t want to sit in a car seat. She doesn’t want to take long naps so I can make the apartment look perfect and tackle my huge pile of paperwork. I’m not even sure I’m going to be able to go vote in what I think is a very important local election for Los Angeles. 

And for the first time I’m really seeing what this conditioning is. It’s a vestigial organ that has no purpose. It’s this free floating piece of code rattling around in my brain, causing me suffering when I believe it, with no reason for its continued  existence. 

I read through 20 years of journals last weekend thinking I was going to find what went wrong, what happened in the past to cause all this personal suffering in my present, and maybe how I was wrong or bad to cause all this. I didn’t find it. I saw my innocence. I saw a little girl, and then a young woman trusting the adults in her life who told her perfection was attainable. I saw this brilliant, loving girl praying for everyone she knew to experience God, because when she experienced God it was pure bliss, and she wanted the whole world to feel that. 

I don’t suffer because of the things in my past. I suffer when I believe my old conditioning. I just get a doomy feeling sometimes, like we all do. I feel something nagging at the back of my mind, and I feel a little anxiety. My old conditioning gets triggered, and I’m off to the races looking for all the ways I’m wrong and bad. If I scour my thinking enough, I’ll find the bug, and fix it. 

It’s like I have an old pair of shoes that don’t fit. In fact, they weren’t even my shoes to begin with. They don’t even match. But I’ve been trying to stuff my feet into them for as long as I can remember. Every time I see them in my closet, I need to try them on, just to make sure. Just to see if it’s really my fault they don’t fit. Maybe I can change my feet and get it right next time.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen to the shoes. Right now it feels like I don’t always notice putting them on, but when I notice them on my feet, I take them off. And sometimes I notice when I’m putting them on, and stop. Maybe one day they’ll stay in the back of the closet. Maybe they’ll even disappear. 

I don’t know. 

I don’t think it matters either. They’re just ill fitting shoes. They mean absolutely nothing about me, my feet, my purpose in life, or the kind of work I should do. They mean nothing about my partner, my baby, my body, my health. They mean nothing about my childhood, the spiritual abuse I went through, or the decade of major depression I experienced. I don’t need to make the shoes bigger or make my feet smaller, or just have a better attitude about them pinching my feet. 

It doesn’t mean anything if I put them on without realizing it. It doesn’t mean anything if I wear them for a week before I notice them.

It’s just an old pair of shoes that never fit me, that aren’t even mine. 

For the Harry Potter fans, it’s a Boggart. And I say, “Riddikulus!”

**What a cool app!**

What if the intelligence of life is in all things?

What if it’s supposed to hurt when you touch a hot stove?

What if the design of life is such that a lot of thinking is meant to feel bad?

What if it’s all there to nudge you back to your innate health and wellbeing?

What if it’s not up to you to settle your thinking? What if the intelligence of the system is that it settles all on its own?

What a cool app… wonder what other cool apps we have we don’t know about…

As a child I often experienced a lovely feeling. Innocently, I went into religion looking for more of that experience. I grew up in a charismatic church (think praying in tongues and believing in miracles and healing) where that experience was nurtured, albeit in sometimes bizarre and superstitious ways. As my rational mind matured, I began to see through some of the bullshit around me. I sought to go “deeper” in my faith.

That desire led me into a mix of theology and a form of evangelical spirituality called pietism and revivalism. The theology made me think more, which usually brought me out of the experience of God I was used to. But the religious services and the cult-like ministry I later joined brought that experience alive in a deep, profound way.

I want to be clear: the experience was real. There was just a very innocent misunderstanding of where it came from. The people around me looked in a very different direction.

We all do this. We have a nice feeling, and then we get superstitious and work really hard to recreate that nice feeling. The funny thing is, working hard to create that nice feeling takes it away. It’s when the mind relaxes, and thought settles, that we have that nice feeling.

A college kid experiences the sensation of dropping out of thought when partying and drinking. She clings to that experience and innocently believes the alcohol is what gave her that experience, so she develops a habit of drinking to recreate the feeling. 

I experienced the nice feeling in prayer and church, and I was given labels for that experience: “the presence of God, the Holy Spirit, study, theology, speaking in tongues, ministry, acts of service.”

I spent a summer in a Christian program at the base of the Colorado Rockies. The scenery was stunning and beautiful. I had a life changing encounter where all thought dropped away, and I experienced that feeling fully and completely in every part of me. It was very much like the experience some people report on psychedelic trips. I was love and love was all around me. Selfishness, fear, pettiness, depression, insecurity, anger, hurt… it all dissolved into a feeling of pure bliss.

I was told I needed to work hard to protect the feeling. Don’t watch movies, don’t go on social media except to “be a light”, don’t listen to people who speak of lowly things. Preserve that special feeling by following this list of prescriptions. And it was detailed! From clothes, to hairstyle choices, music, media and entertainment, even the types of Christians I was supposed to listen to and follow. If I spent too much time in the wrong churches, that feeling would go away. It was sacred, and I needed to be sacred to protect it. The world and the devil would take it away if I stopped being vigilant for even a second.

But I have an intellect. I love learning and solving puzzles. That love led me to a rigorous academic program at a Christian university. We studied the church fathers alongside Greek tragedies, Plato alongside Genesis, and Virginia Woolf alongside C.S. Lewis. I think I read around 300 “Great Books” total. I also completed a degree in philosophy, and sharpened my critical thinking skills.

The experience of God came less and less. The chapel services felt very different from the intense cult-like community I spent the summer in. I felt a lot of judgment when I went to chapel because they weren’t doing it “right.” And then in my classes I analyzed and abstracted God to death. Literally. I left college unable to believe in my religion, and acknowledged I was an atheist a few years later. It was inevitable. I abstracted him out of existence for me. 

I see it so clearly now. The innocence of it. Everyone along the way was looking for that nice feeling, developing little superstitious rituals to protect it. It all looked Very Serious and Very Spiritual, but it was no different than a baseball player who firmly believes his lucky socks win him games. 

The socks don’t do anything. But his brain developed a way of relating to the socks. When he puts the lucky socks on, he falls into the zone and plays better. He plays more focused and less distracted by thought.

Worship music allowed me to fall out of my thinking. I got in the zone. Theology and philosophy were these fun puzzles and games I got to play. My innocent misunderstanding was thinking they were supposed to bring me closer to that nice feeling. The more I went into my thinking for that feeling, the less I experienced it. 

All innocent. 

We’re all looking for that nice feeling. The best news is that it is the backdrop of life. It’s always there. What you experience when you don’t feel it is thought. The mind thinks constantly. But the nice feeling is always there in the background. It’s the space of consciousness that makes thought come alive. 

**Let’s play a game.**

Slow down for a second. Settle. Take a couple deep breaths.

Inhale, hold for a beat, exhale.

Do it again. This time notice the space between the inhale and exhale.

What do you feel?

This is you. This is consciousness without thought noticing existence. This is the lovely feeling when you drop out of thought. 

Inhale, hold for a beat, exhale. Notice the space after the exhale. Thought rushes in. You feel the sensation of thought. This is not you. This is consciousness experiencing thought. 

Inhale, hold for a beat, exhale. Notice the space between the inhale and exhale. The open space that never changes. This is you. What does it feel like?

Inhale, hold for a beat, exhale. Notice the space after. Did you notice how the thought appearing is different this time? Thought is a river that changes constantly. It is a gift. It is the source of suffering, but it is a gift. It is not you. It is the creative potential of energy appearing in a moment. Know this: it is always changing. 

You are the backdrop.