Inside Out

Three differences Aaron Turner highlights between the Three Principles and CBT

1) Comparing thought to an external “reality” is meaningless

Aaron says CBT’s practice of checking thoughts against some external reality is flawed because our perception is always through thought, so you can’t access a reality outside your perception to compare to.

2)... See more

At one point, someone used the word “daymare” to me to describe scary thinking that comes to mind when we’re awake. I had never been troubled by “nightmares” because I recognized they were just scary stories that occurred to me during sleep, as my father had told me since toddlerhood. He had explained from the beginning that the imagination never... See more

We can deceive ourselves with our own thinking, but we can’t fool ourselves about how we feel.

If I could understand that my own thinking is dynamic and always changing, wouldn’t it give me hope that I would never be “stuck” in any experience of any life circumstances?

Living from expectations is like living in a house full of rooms-to-go. When you buy rooms-to-go, you get a pre-designed and pre-organized set of furniture arranged a certain way with accessories to match. You take what you get, even if you don’t like all the parts, because it all comes packaged according to a plan. You walk into your home and... See more

As a person sits in a seminar in which ideas about taking advantage of new technology are presented that are foreign to her training and foreign to her own current work, she continually thinks, “This doesn’t fit with what I already know at all. I can’t see how this would work. Nothing can be this simple.” She entertains scornful thoughts about... See more

K.I.S.S. Thoughts form and shimmer and float through our minds like the bubbles my grandson creates with his big “magical” bubble wand. Some are beautiful. Some are misshapen or strange. Some last a long time and hang tantalizingly in the air, or climb towards the sky, keeping us enthralled. Some burst before they even form. Some are huge, and pick... See more

K.I.S.S. Peace and contentment do not come from outside of ourselves. Peace and contentment are states of mind generated from within our own minds, just as bother and upset are states of mind generated from within our own minds. The struggle we engage in to get ourselves out of whatever trouble we’re in is a phantom battle, one thought being set... See more

Between them and their goals were minefields bristling with thoughts of previous failures, of their shortcomings as human beings, of things that were wrong with them, of people who had hurt them or people they had hurt, of fears they felt they could not overcome, of past traumas they couldn’t stop recalling again and again. Every time their freshly... See more