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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Phil Stutz
Read between
June 8 - July 17, 2023
The things which hurt, instruct.
I realized how helpless patients could feel facing a problem by themselves. What they needed were solutions that would give them the power to fight back.
just because I was willing to address my patients’ pain didn’t mean I knew how.
The past has memories, emotions, and insights, all of which have value.
To control behavior you need a specific procedure to use at a specific time to combat a specific problem.
An attitude consists of thoughts happening inside your head—even if you change it, you’re working within the limitations you already have.
This is one of the most maddening things about human nature: we quit doing the things that help us the most.
The health of our society depends on the efforts of each individual.
Strange as it might seem, merely escaping pain isn’t enough for us. We insist that the pain be replaced with pleasure.
Whatever your Comfort Zone consists of, you pay a huge price for it.
Life provides endless possibilities, but along with them comes pain. If you can’t tolerate pain, you can’t be fully alive.
The Comfort Zone is supposed to keep your life safe, but what it really does is keep your life small.
Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Voiceless” wrote: “Alas for those that never sing, / But die with all their music in them.”
We’re trained as a society to expect, even demand, immediate gratification. And we have an extraordinary ability to rationalize this weakness. Instead of admitting we’re avoiding pain, we tell ourselves we’re being virtuous;
A sense of purpose doesn’t come from thinking about it. It comes from taking action that moves you toward the future. The moment you do this, you activate a force more powerful than the desire to avoid pain. We call this the “Force of Forward Motion.”
Your experience of pain changes relative to how you react to it. When you move toward it, pain shrinks. When you move away from it, pain grows. If you flee from it, pain pursues you like a monster in a dream. If you confront the monster, it goes away.
For the Reversal of Desire, the first cue is obvious—right before you’re about to do something you want to avoid.
This is the second cue: each time you catch yourself thinking about the dreaded task, stop thinking and use the tool.
W. H. Murray described it this way: “The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too … raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.”
A true adult accepts that there’s a fundamental difference between the goals we have for ourselves and the goals the universe has for us.
the universe doesn’t care about our external success; its goal is to develop our inner strength. We care about what we achieve on the outside; the universe is interested in who we are on the inside.
adversity is the only way the universe can increase our inner strength.
There’s a hidden, inner strength that you cannot find unless you push yourself through adversity.
you’re refusing to accept an event that’s already happened. Nothing is a bigger waste of time. The more you complain, the more stuck you become.
Inner strength comes only to those who move forward in the face of adversity.
Courage is the ability to act in the face of fear.
To develop courage, you have to give up this illusion of future certainty.
The first step is to learn to experience fear without the mental image of the dreaded future event. Focus all your awareness on how the fear feels right now, in the present. When you’ve separated fear from what you’re afraid of in the future, it becomes just another kind of pain you process with the Reversal of Desire.
But another group isn’t lying; they truly don’t feel pain or fear. Unfortunately, that’s because they’re so deep in the Comfort Zone that they’ve lost touch with the whole world of possibilities that exist outside the Comfort Zone. This type of person is actually more afraid than the average person; they just deal with the fear by denying there’s anything more they want out of life.
When you’re in the Maze, life passes you by.
This is a cherished, childish assumption—“If I’m good, the world will be good to me.” We should know better—the world violates this assumption every day.
This is why the Maze almost always involves fantasies of revenge or restitution. You’re engaged in a futile attempt to restore fairness to your world.
The trick to getting out of the Maze is to generate a form of love that’s independent of your immediate reactions.
You have to make a conscious effort to generate love when someone has just wronged you.
Part of growing up spiritually is understanding that it takes work to be truly loving.
To reiterate: as human beings we are given access to the infinite, but we have to work for it; it doesn’t come for free.
People are more perceptive than you think: when you confront them, they will intuit what you’re feeling inside—love or hate—because that tells them how you value the relationship.
Once in a while, Active Love won’t work because the other person has no goodwill. You’ve lost nothing, because you never would’ve gained this person’s respect in any case. In fact, you’ll feel a kind of calm confidence rather than the raw, obsessive emotions that overwhelmed you in the Maze because you’ll see the other person with clarity.
It’s a waste of time thinking you know the ultimate truth about another person. All you get is the sense that you’re “right”;
As you stop wasting energy on superficial annoyances the important things in life will move you more deeply.
The human ego doesn’t like to experience anything more powerful than itself.
Real power doesn’t come from you as an individual. It comes from the fact that you’re channeling something greater than you.
When you have real power, you have no need to prove anything to anyone. Free of your own ego, you’re functioning from the highest part of yourself. In this state, you can inspire the higher parts of those around you. That’s the only way conflict is truly resolved.
Everyone in your life is imperfect, either because of something they’ve done in the past or something they can’t change in the present. Fixating on these things destroys relationships. You need a tool that allows you to accept people despite their flaws.
Outflow is the force that accepts everything as it is.
freezing is actually caused by an inner insecurity; an insecurity you may not even be aware of until you suddenly lose your ability to express yourself.
Insecurity destroys people’s ability to connect with one another.
People give you opportunities because they feel connected to you.
The “Shadow” is everything we don’t want to be but fear we are, represented in a single image. It’s called the Shadow because it follows us wherever we go.
the Shadow determines how you see yourself.
