• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Change inherently includes going toward one possibility and closing the door on others. Moving to start a great job might mean being away from your family. The park ranger who gets a higher position misses being outside. Being promoted to store manager means losing the peer camaraderie of fellow employees. Having a child brings joy and sleepless nights. You love your daily exercise but miss sitting with a cup of tea and reading the paper. That’s the dance. Hello and goodbye all come together.

8. Persevere. If you fall off the horse get back on and keep riding. This is a crucial step. It’s like keeping the weight off after you start a diet, continuing to take steps to meet a new partner, or playing more with your children. Don’t lose heart if you start backtracking from the changes you are making. Most people fall off and get up many times before a new behavior is incorporated into their way of living. I was unable to finish a manuscript or article for over ten years before I finally completed one—a four hundred page book. I was watching the world figure skating competition and a Chinese skater said she fell forty-four times before she was able to land a quadruple jump. It was agonizing to see the videos of her falls . . . but beautiful to see the first time she made it—the joy radiated on her face. People who stay unstuck are good at getting back on the horse. It’s not that anything is magically easy. They struggle, make mistakes, feel challenged, take a few spills, and keep going.

Staying aware of those sneaky little thoughts that grab you by the throat is a key to knowing yourself more deeply. Because action brings resistance to the surface, you learn to stare your saboteurs in the face. To meet your saboteurs, dance with them, and realize they are paper dragons from childhood will help lessen their power. It’s like saying, “I’m not going to let a scared/needy little kid run my life. I’m an adult and I’m taking charge, even if I have to drag myself kicking and screaming to get started.” Once you’ve taken these steps you can relax into the pleasure of being more comfortably centered in your life. Then take on something new.

46. Release Yourself of Roadblocks and Negative Thinking

In one Buddhist meditation practice, whenever the mind starts to wander you say “thinking” and come back to following your breath. You don’t explore the thought or what it means; you see it generically as a thought and shift your focus back to your breathing.

You can do the same when your mind throws up a roadblock to change. Take note of any excuses, fears, complaints, negative thinking, or worries that are habitual and irrational. Instead of giving them mental attention, say “roadblock!” This is not to say that there aren’t some realistic considerations to weigh when you make a decision, but it’s habitual for people who stay stuck to think immediately about why something is hard or it won’t work. It’s like constantly throwing ice cubes in a soup you’re trying to heat up. It’s all about fear, usually of dissolving your ego’s definition of who you are:

After saying “roadblock,” ask yourself.

“What am I afraid of?” or “What am I resisting?”

“What’s the worst thing about that?” As fear comes up, repeat the question until you get to the core of the fear.

“What if I didn’t have that negative thought? What would happen if that belief simply evaporated, formless and harmless, into the universe, zapped by some cosmic laser beam?”

You can explore negative thinking from many perspectives. From a psychological perspective, it can be related to depression and be seen as a reflection of fear. From a Zen perspective, thoughts are just energy, you simply see the thought as a thought and not give it attention. From the Buddhist perspective in which we are not understood as individual selves nor with a separate lifespan, thinking is highly unimportant. And from the Buddhist perspective that we create our suffering through our attachments, you