It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling responsible for other people's emotions, reactions, and inner turmoil. We have an innate desire to be understood and accepted. So when others seem upset with us, judge us, or want us to change, we leap to explain, rationalize, and pacify. But in our quest to please or appease, we often lose ourselves.... See more
The lowest level of choice is not making a conscious choice at all, which happens when you don’t notice that you even could make a choice. In this case there is effectively no space between stimulus and response, so you just act out your habitual behavior unconsciously. If you ever find yourself skimming the news or looking in the fridge without... See more
learn to notice what’s happening with your broad awareness of the space around you. I’ve written before about the idea that awareness—the breadth of things you are able to notice in any given moment—can expand and collapse. Collapsed awareness is like tunnel vision, where there’s a sense that the wider world around you goes away while the thing... See more