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.