Coming Alive: 4 Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression & Unleash Your Soul's Potential

Part X will do everything it can to prevent you from experiencing the Truth. Its first tactic is obvious—it gets you to lie to yourself.

Simply catching X in the act—over and over again—helped me gain a sense of distance from it.

PRINCIPLE 2: THE TRUTH HURTS It’s painful to be seized by this otherworldly force. In fact, we tell our patients, “If it doesn’t hurt, you’re probably lying to yourself.”

HOW PART X ATTACKS YOU: It floods you with feelings of hopelessness that are so strong you give up pursuing your dreams. Certain you’ll never get what you want, you stop trying.

The weird truth is, you can’t learn to pick yourself up unless you get knocked down.

the most important things enter the world through the smallest things. The commonplace is crucial because most of our time is spent doing commonplace things. What matters is the ability to keep moving through everyday transitions:

If you’re convinced your future is bleak, then nothing you do in the present is going to amount to anything anyway, so why bother doing it?

This creates another use for the Vortex, maybe its most important use: the tool gives you the energy to overcome your inertia and to keep moving through the endless transitions life demands. Most people focus on the bigger, more challenging events in life, but the forces that drive the universe function on a much smaller level. We call this the wor

Part X takes advantage of this human laziness. It takes whatever you consciously hope for—a good relationship, successful children, or a lucrative career—and converts it into an unconscious hope for magic. Then, when you don’t get what you’d hoped for, Part X floods you with a crushing sense of hopelessness.