By Don Goewey

Thoughts are your greatest power.  You are what you think you are.  See for yourself.  Spend the day tracking every anxious, fearful, stressful thought you think.  Bring these thoughts into simple awareness.  Observe the emotion each carries. Look at the picture it paints that becomes the world you see. 

It’s the weight on your heart produced by the thought I’m not going to make it that can suddenly diffuse into cold fear, immobilizing you completely.  A moment later the fear can sink into depression that casts a shadow over your life.  The world you will see through this thought-generated-lens will feel unsafe, unkind and seem  hell bent on crushing your dreams. 

The term we give this mind-made picture is “reality.”  It is not some fixed reality.  It is a representation of your own state of mind.

Three out of four of us are struggling with stress and anxiety.  When stress and anxiety are chronic, the brain becomes fear conditioned and wires for fight or flight.  We see life through the eyes of our primitive brain, leading us to believe that we are alone, lost and constantly pursued by predators.  When this part of the brain takes charge, life becomes a nightmare.  It all begins in thought, as Robert Sapolsky of  Stanford University states: (more…)

By Don Goewey

All of the great spiritual masters see the same enormous capacity in each and every one of us.  The Buddha says that your mind is naturally illuminated. Jesus says you are the light of the world.  Muhammad says heaven is nearer to any of you than the strap of your shoe.
  
 All the sages tell us that if you read between the lines of the story that anxiety and stress script, you begin to discern the voice of sanity called peace, quieting, focusing and unifying your mind.  They point to peace as the foundation from which a natural state of joy arises to express and extend the creative force in you that can achieve anything.
 
 They say behind all the conditions of poor health, broken hearts and personal failure there is a power inside that can “move mountains” on the outside, regardless of circumstances.

 So why isn’t this usual experience?  What happened?
 
 Fear is what happened.

 ”Our deepest fear,” states Marianne Williamson in A Return to Love, “is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”
  
 The Trappist monk Thomas Merton echoes that sentiment: “Perhaps I am stronger than I think,” he wrote. “Perhaps I am even afraid of my strength and turn it against myself, thus making myself weak. . . . Perhaps I am most afraid of the strength of God in me.”
 
 ”Is a candle meant to be put under a bushel, or under a bed, and not to be set on a candlestick?”  Jesus asked.  Of course, we all know the answer.  So what’s the problem? (more…)