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We don’t attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment.
The next time you’re feeling stress or discomfort, ask yourself whose business you’re in mentally, and you may burst out laughing! That question can bring you back to yourself.
And if you practice it for a while, you may come to see that you don’t have any business
either and that your life runs perfectly well on its own.
A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but the attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.
Stories are the untested, uninvestigated theories that tell us what all these things mean.
It is easy to be swept away by some overwhelming feeling, so it’s helpful to remember that any stressful feeling is like a compassionate alarm clock that says, “You’re caught in the dream.” Depression, pain, and fear are gifts that say, “Sweetheart, take a look at what you’re thinking right now. You’re living in a story that isn’t true for you.”
I realized that I could be right, or I could be free. It
Reality doesn’t wait for your opinion, vote, or permission, sweetheart. It just keeps being what it is and doing what it does.
I became a character in the pages of a myth of suffering—the heroine of suffering, trapped in a world filled with injustice.
The answer to question 4 may leave us without an identity. This is very exciting. You’re left with nothing and as nothing other than the reality of the moment: woman sitting in a chair, writing. This can be a little scary, since it leaves no illusion of a past or future. You might ask, “How do I live now? What do I do? Nothing is meaningful.” And I would say, “ ’With no past or future, you won’t know how to live’—can you really know that that’s true? ‘You don’t know what to do, and nothing is meaningful’—can you really know that that’s true?” Write down your fears and walk yourself through
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everything you think you see on the outside is really a projection of your own mind.
In discovering the innocence of the person you judged, you’ll come to recognize your own innocence.
When I realized through inquiry that I had hurt someone in my past, I stopped hurting anyone. If, even after this, I hurt someone, I told them immediately why I did it, what I was afraid of losing, or what I wanted to get from them; and I began again, always with a clean slate. This is a powerful way to live freely.
There’s no way she can’t be a mirror
When a thought appears such as “Do the dishes” and you don’t do them, notice how an internal war breaks out. It sounds like this: “I’ll do them later. I should have done them by now. My roommate should have done them. It’s not my turn. It’s not fair. People will think less of me if I don’t do them now.” The stress and weariness you feel are really mental combat fatigue.
