Setting Down the Hammer of Stress

A good friend of mine was talking to me about a problem at work.  He was thinking about the problem, the role other people were playing, and his experience dealing with this problem.  As he shifted from subject to subject I could see his feelings change accordingly.  He was disheartened. As he talked he went from feeling bother to frustration, to confusion, to anger, all of which are forms of stress.

The Principles are simple.  Understanding them reveals what is true in each moment.  For example, whatever we are thinking right now, we will feel.  We are free thinkers. We are free to think about any subject in the world.  But we will always feel the thoughts we are having about our subject. 

At any moment you could say that one of two things is going on for any of us.  Either we are aware of the Principles, e.g. right now I am feeling my thinking, or we are not aware of the Principles, e.g. right now I am so engrossed in the subject that I am thinking about that I am not aware that what I am thinking is creating a feeling.  In each moment we understand the Principles or we don’t.  This is true for me, for you, and for every one of us. 

As my friend talked to me about his problem, he was so engrossed in the subject that he was completely unaware that he was thinking up his own stress.  Consequently, he thought that his discomfort was because of what was happening at work.  He believed that whatever he was feeling was justified by the problem.  As he was analyzing he was unaware of the Principles and didn’t realize the way in which this thinking was creating more and more stress. 

Thinking up stress is like picking up a hammer and repeatedly hitting yourself on the head while talking about a problem.  You are in pain but you are oblivious to the hammer.  Thought recognition is seeing yourself hammering your head, realizing the connection between hammering and your pain, and then setting the hammer down.  Setting the hammer down is not a technique.  It is a built-in human response to realizing the true source of your present moment stress.

There are many times when I am thinking about a subject or an idea and I am so engrossed in the idea that I don’t see the fact of Thought creating my experience in that moment.  As I became  more aware of the Thought-feeling connection, my focus shifted from the subjects in my mind to the effect my thinking was having on me.  I was shocked to see how much of my thinking was creating stress, e.g. seriousness, discomfort, anxiety, uncertainty, and subtle tension.  When I see that I am thinking up this stress I don't tend to continue to think about the subject at hand.  With awareness it drops away.  More and more of my thinking has been dropping away leaving my head open and clear.

Being aware of the fact of Thought allows me to see the pain- inducing hammering I am doing.  This understanding allows the hammering to subside or stop.  I start to feel better and think better.  A mind free of stressful thoughts is the gateway for the automatic arising of fresh thinking. This creates feelings of well-being, higher level perspectives, and solutions to our problems.  This kind of thinking does not create stress. 

I reminded my friend of the role Thought was playing in his current stress and of the in-built potential for new thinking.  As he realized this, his stressful thinking fell away.  I saw him lighten up considerably.  Right away he started having his own insights into his problem.  He continued to have more insights the next day as well.

Stress is an invitation to wake up to the Thought-feeling connection.  Realizing the Principle-based foundation of our feelings results in more of our stress-producing thoughts dropping away.  And how rewarding it is when our well-being fills in the space left as this thinking clears away.  Every one of us can begin to wake up from the enchantment with the subjects we think about. As we do, we see and set down the hammer of our stressful thinking!

Discovering The Human Panoramic App

The other day my wife, Coizie, and I were exploring a new trail that opened up to magnificent vistas of the sun dappled ocean and nearby islands covered with fir and cedar trees.  In the face of this beauty I dropped my mind chatter and just was mesmerized by the spectacular scene. 

It suddenly occurred to me to use an app on my iPhone called Pano.  This app allows you to take any number of photos side by side and then it will stitch them together into a single panoramic shot.  These photos were able to capture the 180-degree view in front of us the way my usual single photo couldn’t.

Later, looking at these amazing photos, I realized that humans already have this app built into them.  I like the metaphor of shifting between a single shot, very narrow view to a wide-angle, full view in our experience.

Sometimes our focus on the world in this present moment collapses in on something we are thinking about in such a way that it creates a feeling of discomfort.  We leave the present moment and our focus narrows down to the examination of a specific perceived problem in the outside world. We get caught up in thoughts that lower our spirits.  We are preoccupied.  We are dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.  Or we are trying to analyze our way to clarity or solution.

In other words, we are caught up in our personal thinking in a way that is not being truly helpful.  This thinking creates feelings of unease, struggle, uncertainty, doubt, stress, or upset.  We become wedded to our personal thinking and limited by what these thoughts allow us to see or know. We become close-minded. In this sense we are no longer open to any new thinking. 

Bring on the human panoramic app!  Realizing that these feelings are simply being created from thought wakes us out of the trance of our personal thinking and throws us back into the panoramic view of the present moment.  This reflex to let go of what we now know to be the true source to our psychological pain is built into humans!  As we wake back up to the present moment we no longer keep thinking the way we were.  We fall into a wide-open, panoramic view that immediately becomes receptive to new thinking and a broader perspective.

It is easy for all of us to forget that we have a panoramic app.  We all get caught up in our thinking and attribute our feeling to something outside of us.  But the more we catch onto this the more we seem to open back up to new possibilities.  I am grateful for those times in the day when my feeling wakes me up to the thinking I am doing that is unnecessarily narrowing my capacity for new thinking and a big picture view.

In the openness of our panoramic view we are no longer confined to the limitations of our personal thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.  We are influenced by newness and we can now be informed by possibilities.  Enjoy discovering this very human app and the breadth and beauty of its views. 

What Does "Deepening Our Grounding" Mean?

Recently I spent 3 weeks sharing my understanding of the Principles with four different groups of eager students in England.  How rewarding to see their faces, their open-ended curiosity, and burning commitment to deepen their grounding.  I was really touched to see these lovely people being so impacted on all levels.  The spiritual dimension of life was coming alive for them in very heartfelt shifts in their ways of seeing the world. 

As I led these trainings I found myself talking to my audiences about what it means to “deepen one’s grounding” and would like to share my insights about this. 

Actually the word “grounding” may not be the best metaphor because it implies that there is some place to land, some thing to get, some thing to think about.  But grounding deepens as a result of an insight into the nature of life itself.  These realizations, as Syd Banks says, lead you into a meditative state of mind where personal thinking quiets down and wisdom reveals itself.  This is simply a mind where there is less personal thinking, more presence, more openness, and more space for new thinking to arise. 

Therefore, a deeper grounding is not a place to land, but an intuition that leaves us with less thinking and more interior space.  This shift typically brings with it a newfound feeling of well-being, a new way of seeing the world that has more understanding, and sometimes it brings, but not necessarily, new ideas.

How is it that insights into the Principles can lead us into a meditative state of relaxed presence and awareness, into a new world view or level of consciousness? 

Here is how it seems to me now.  This is only one way of trying to articulate how our grounding deepens.  The Principles create our feelings and experiences from the inside-out.  As we realize the truth to the inside-out nature of the mind, we begin to be relieved of the thinking involved as a result of our misunderstanding that the world creates our experience.  As soon as we stop attributing what we feel to other people or our circumstances, we stop thinking about them.  Our personal thinking quiets naturally.   

With less personal thinking we become more present.  Less personal thinking leaves more space in our minds.  The chatter in our minds quiets.  Less static.  More silence.  Less preoccupation.  More being in the present.  More presence.

 More space is a requirement for new thinking to arise.  Insights from wisdom await space in the same way sunlight awaits a break in the clouds so that it can shine through.  More space allows the light of consciousness to shine through.  More space creates more openness and awareness.  We become more present, more relaxed, more awake. 

Fortunately, there is no end to the possibility of us having new insights that keep “deepening our grounding” and creating more of the interior space that enlivens us.

Understanding Strong Emotions

I received an inquiry from someone whose child had died many years ago.  Her feelings then were intense and overwhelming.  Recently she has been learning the Principles and wonders how she could have used the Principles to "manage" her thinking and feelings in order to "cope" better.  This is how I answer her:


I recognize how strong our emotions can be around loss, especially loss of a child.  All of us have had very strong emotions at times that seem to completely take us over.  The point of learning the Principles, as far as I can see, is not to learn how to manage and control our thinking and feelings.  And believe me, I tried very hard to do that for years when I first learned them.


When we have feelings and emotions there is no need for our egos to get in there and judge them as good or bad or right or wrong.  If we understand that every feeling is created from Universal Mind then we don't have to see it as our job to fix, control, or manage our feelings.  If we understand the nature of a feeling we know that it is being created perfectly from the Principles.  We realize that our feeling is simply a temporary experience created from our own thinking and is not caused from anything outside of us.  We can then realize that our feeling is not a permanent reality.


My favorite metaphor to illustrate this is the weather.  We don't delude ourselves into thinking we can control or stop the rain or wind.  We can understand it and factor it in so that we accommodate it in our lives.  And it is not as if ultimately the rain is bad and the sun is good.  The Principles are the creative force behind our human operating system.  They create our experiences and they are working perfectly.  We can trust the intelligence behind this system.


We have all kinds of feelings and emotions.  Understanding that they are always born from within by the creative energy behind life allows us to simply experience them as a little child does.  Children often experience strong emotions without complicating them with analysis and efforts to manage them.  Understanding allows feelings to go through us in a way that allows us to be resilient.  All of the feelings and emotions that you have been having are normal and natural.  These thoughts come into us before we have any say over them.  Understanding allows us to have these without resistance, struggle, guilt, or judgment.  Understanding leads us to thinking less about ourselves and our experiences.  Understanding leads us to greater resilience, and we become more comfortable and accepting of all of our emotions.


My heart goes out to everyone who goes through the loss of a loved one, and I hope that this is helpful.

Awakening Our Spiritual Eyes

I was strolling with my wife, daughter and her two kids through acres and acres of tulip fields at a local farm here in La Conner.  Broad bold stripes of reds, pinks, whites, yellows, oranges, and purples set against the farms and towering Cascade Mountains.  The early evening sun gave a golden warm hue to everything.

The beauty was so commanding that it allowed my family and me to drop out of our busy minds and into the sacredness of the present moment.  Beneath the chattering of our minds is an ever-present backdrop of quiet and stillness.  This backdrop is where we all experience life unfiltered by the distractions and distortions of our conceptual thoughts.  We are so amazingly designed -- when our personal thinking falls away we are able to connect with this inner core of quiet.  And when this connection is made this quiet core so often awakens in us feelings of aliveness, vitality, gratitude and love.  This core awakened in me a deep sense of connection with everyone who was passing me in the fields.  When our minds are at rest in our souls, a deeper sense of clarity and tenderness arises.  I noticed that everyone was smiling and being nice to one another.  How wonder-full it is to learn that understanding the 3 Principles point us within to this quiet, enlivened place where our deepest humanity is awakened and brings greater spiritual sensitivity and caring into the world.  To know in our heart of hearts that this quiet place always exists within us, and that it has the power to awaken the sense of sacred in us, is a priceless gift.  I am amazed by this ever-present capacity in us to see the beauty in each other and in the world around us.  I call this deep core spiritual because it is a formless, creative energy that is ultimately indescribable, yet it is the essence of who we are as human beings.  And I got lots of hugs from little Jacob and Eva out in those fields.  I stop to take photos of them because I know they are also seeing everyone and everything through those same sacred eyes!

Feelings: A Curse or a Blessing?

Do you know there is a fundamental misunderstanding that each and every one of us has every day?  And do you know that this misunderstanding is responsible for a major part of our stress and preoccupation?  It is such a simple and common misunderstanding, but most of us fail to recognize it in ourselves and in others.  What is this misunderstanding?  We erroneously believe a good part of the time that our feelings are created from something other than thought.  For example, we may believe that a deadline is causing us stress, the traffic is making us upset, our spouse is bothering us, or that the sun makes us feel good.  

When we don’t recognize our feelings as coming from thought, we attribute our feelings to something in the outside world, e.g. the deadline, the traffic, our spouse, the weather.  Often we keep thinking about what we believe is causing our feelings.  This thinking may generate even more stress, upset, or preoccupation. We may see our feelings, especially our painful ones, as a curse imposed on us from the outside. Rather, when we understand the connection between thought and feelings, we will see our feelings as a blessing, tipping us off to their source within and reminding us that’s where they always and only come from.

As we learn about the 3 Principles of Thought, Consciousness, and Mind we are reminded of the fact that we live exclusively in a world of our own thinking.  We also learn that each and every thought we have creates a feeling.  As we realize this for ourselves, we have more and more moments of actually experiencing the truth of this fact.  This realization corrects the misunderstanding that our feelings are coming from anything other that thought.  It allows us to be fully accountable for our feelings rather than blaming them on someone or something else.

It is humbling to realize that all of us, with no exception, get lost in those moments when we misunderstand where our feelings are coming from and act as if the world is causing our feeling.  But it is up-lifting to learn that we all operate exactly the same way and that we can all become more aware that we live in a thought-created world.  Learning more about the thought-feeling connection is a short cut to well-being.  Do you think you can now see your feelings as the blessing that they are? 

The Three Principles: Our Shared Humanity

The first time I heard Sydney Banks talk about the Three Principles nearly 26 years ago I was impacted. I began having insights that over the years have given me a quality of life that I had never imagined possible. I feel so blessed to have come across such a simple way to understand my life.  I am so grateful that it allowed me to develop deeply loving relationships with my wife and two children.  I can’t believe the career I have traveling the country to share with others this amazing gift.  And it is still mind-boggling that there is no end to learning how we all operate. As I sit here I am aware of the fact that whatever I think, I feel and experience.  This is true now in this moment, it has always been true, and will always be true.  And yet there have been, and continue to be, so many moments when I don’t realize this, and it seems like my feeling is caused by something or someone in the physical world. Yesterday as I was driving to town a car was tailgating me. I got really annoyed with this driver.  I was sure that his inconsiderate and unsafe driving was making me annoyed.  Every thought I had about this driver seemed to be true.  And I seemed to be justified in feeling the way I was because of how he was driving.  Seeing the Principles is a slippery thing for all of us.  Sometimes we see feeling as thought and sometimes we don’t.  It’s easy for all of us to lose sight of the fact that it is always and only our thinking that is creating what we feel.  The Three Principles are not three really good ideas.  The Three Principles of Thought, Consciousness, and Mind create from the inside-out each moment of our thinking-feeling connection.   Mind is the ultimate source that is creating all of life.  Thought is creating our constant flow of thinking.  Consciousness is what brings our thinking alive and allows us to have a sensory experience of life.  The Principles are always operating in us.  At moments we realize this and at moments we don’t.  And that is ok.  It keeps us all humble about this.  It puts us all on the same playing field, new-comer and old-timer alike.  This is simply our humanity.

Welcome to Three Principles Mentoring

Would you like to learn something that is simple, and yet, will help you understand the way every person's moment-to-moment feeling and experience is created?  And I do mean every single person on this planet.  Because how our experience is created is the same for everyone.  My hope is that as you reflect at this site your own understanding of how humans truly operate will deepen.  I will share with you my understanding of:

• The Three Principles that are the foundation of the creation of all human experience.
• Why understanding the true source of our feelings naturally reveals the present moment to us.
• How this understanding creates a life of greater ease with our ever changing experiences.
• How readily available to us is sensible and inspired thought to guide us in life.
• Why it is that as our understanding of the Principles deepens we have richer and more meaningful relationships with others.

What is a Three Principle Mentor?  A Three Principle Mentor is someone who is a trusted guide to gently point you toward discovering for yourself the keys to how all human beings operate.


I look forward to sharing this adventure with you.