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Intentions

How You Hold Yourself Can Change Everything

Imagine you’re brought to a beautiful place where you’ll be meeting a person with whom you’ll share an incredible, lifelong love – a romantic love or a powerful friendship, or… Read More

The Power of Mantras

Once I went to see a spiritual teacher who planned to write a mantra on my tongue using a leaf dipped in honey. But she ran out of leaves. Or… Read More

How to Make Your Resolutions More Effective

As 2022 approaches, perhaps your mind has been on certain lifestyle changes you plan to make or some goals you intend to achieve over the next year. It’s important to… Read More

Use Your Power to Change the World in 2021

The first of January has often felt to me like an arbitrary date to divide our lives by, since most of our projects and phases don’t conform to the calendar… Read More

Forget Resolutions: Gratitude and the Process of Constant Creation

The holidays are a good time to remember what we’re grateful for, and right now I’m grateful that the holidays are over. Don’t get me wrong, I spent lots of… Read More

Intention Matters

Intention matters. A lot. Seventeen years ago, I had a girlfriend who proclaimed that she was going to open her own spa. Sixteen years ago this month, we opened our… Read More

In this first example, we’re looking at the intersection of desire and fear with that of being in control versus out of control. Wanting control is a primary human motivator. A great many of our upsets can be traced to an underlying fear of being out of control. But pursuing control may amplify the belief that we’re not in control. This can be a tricky catch-22 to work with. So if you have a strong desire to be in control (upper right quadrant), you’d do well to address yourself to the fear of being out of control (lower left). These are easy for most people to access. Can you think of a situation that arouses the fear of being out of control? Holding that in mind, what happens in your body? Can you feel some physical unease? What happens if you don’t resist that feeling? What happens if you even invite it to be felt with your whole being, willingly allowing it spread over you? And what happens when you imagine opening yourself, like opening a closed fist that contains a butterfly, and let it peacefully depart? If this process diminished the intensity of the feeling, but not completely, try doing it several times in succession. For more on this form of body-centered releasing, check out our book, Freedom. Less obvious – but not uncommon – is the fear of being in control (lower right quadrant). If you’re in control, does that mean whatever happens is your fault? Maybe being in control feels like too much responsibility. If control issues are significant for you, I encourage you to do the process described in the last paragraph with the idea of situation in which you are in control. What comes up? Last, there’s the desire to be out of control (lower left quadrant). Though this may seem totally foreign to someone who’s rigidly clenching around every aspect of life, there’s always a hidden part that yearns for the relief of being out of control. Anyone who’s ever been to a college party at the end of finals has witnessed plenty of desire to be out of control. Try visiting with all four quadrants and journaling about how each state exists in you. You might also have fun with the following variation – desire and fear of independence versus dependence.

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Can We be Misguided by Spiritual Truths?

Meeting the Part of Yourself That Wants to Be Out of Control

Truly Useful Real-Life Skills

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