We sometimes make relationships and communications more difficult than they need to be through innocent misunderstanding of the state of mind that facilitates good communication. Common communication problems are not truly listening, which happens when we're thinking about the next point we want to make or taking things personally and thinking about ourselves rather than listening for the point. To sidestep awkward or difficult communication, we can listen to the other(s) from a quiet mind, with...
Jul 05, 2025•36 min•Ep. 195
Christine offers the metaphor of life seeming like a high-speed train ride. We settle down, look out, and take in the view as the train slowly starts to move. Then we experience the illusion, as the train speeds up, that life is moving past us. Suddenly, when the train reaches full speed, life is a blur rushing by, and we can barely take it in or enjoy it. Many of us spend a lot of our time moving and thinking so fast that we are always in a hurry -- doing the best we can to make sense of the bl...
Jun 21, 2025•35 min•Ep. 194
Life, as Sydney Banks described it, is "a contact sport." In a contact sport, each player has great plays and terrible plays. Wins and losses. Injuries they cause and injuries that happen to them. No one can expect smooth sailing under cloudless skies every minute of every day. Our life is our learning adventure. Life offers us the development of new skills, the clarity to learn from mistakes, the humility to recognize that denying our role in ups and down holds us back. Denial sustains the unea...
May 31, 2025•37 min•Ep. 193
When people are in low moods -- such as anxiety, hopelessness, grief, anger, discouragement -- the immediate response is to figure out what or who is bothering us so we can deal with the perpetrator or circumstance that we think is bringing us down. That is the trick of our mind explained by the Principles. We are the source of our thoughts -- but as we experience thoughts coming to life, it looks like things are happening TO us. As we understand that we are the thinkers creating our experience,...
May 19, 2025•33 min•Ep. 192
Optimism is looking for the best in people and looking for the beauty in life, and trusting we'll see solutions when faced with challenge. Hopelessness is insecurity about whether people will accept or like us, seeing risk or danger in life, and focusing on analyzing what is wrong when faced with challenge. Those opposite states are not the result of life; they are the result of how we are using our thinking to describe life. Hopelessness and Optimism are both habits of thought that we adopt wit...
May 03, 2025•39 min•Ep. 191
Over time, we take on ideas about who we are and how we are. We start to see them as our personality, our character. Maybe someone we respect has frequently referred to us as a hard worker. Maybe a friend has commented favorably on our looks. Maybe a sibling has called us stupid. Maybe a counselor has diagnosed us as anxious or depressed. Whatever "labels" have affected us become the story we believe about ourselves. Without understanding the way Thought works, we can hold ourselves back -- or e...
Apr 26, 2025•37 min•Ep. 190
We don't always realize that the only source of our feelings and experience about life is our power to think and our thoughts coming to life as our personal reality. So we often "blame" our experience on what other people say or think, or believe that we need others to say or do things to make us happy. The Principles explain that our experience is generated from within ourselves. When we see that we can change our minds and change our experience, we know we do not live at the mercy of life circ...
Apr 18, 2025•33 min•Ep. 189
It's natural for people, groups, nations to have differing ideas, and for them to believe in them. This only creates conflict, hostility, or anxiety when the people involved become attached to their ideas and take them personally. That can lead to polarization and hostility, rather than interaction from the understanding that every person's thinking looks real to them. If one party thinks "A" is the answer and another party thinks "Z" is the answer, the solution arises from understanding the pow...
Apr 11, 2025•31 min•Ep. 188
When events leave people feeling hopeless or afraid, the inclination we have is to share our fear, or to follow people who feel the same. Yet we know deep down that hopelessness and fear do not solve problems or inspire solutions. Events have no power to make feel bad or good -- how and what we THINK about events creates our feelings. As the thinkers, we always have the power to clear our heads and find fresh thoughts. When things are difficult or confusing, we still have wisdom within us. If we...
Mar 22, 2025•31 min•Ep. 187
"Panic" crops up a lot in conversation. "I realized I forgot to finish that report and I panicked." "Tests always induce panic in me." "She panicked when her brother uncovered her secret." The actual experience of panic -- racing heart, shaking, sweaty palms -- is unpleasant. We tend to think events and things induce that feeling in us. But panic is just the feelings arising from the build-up of distressing thinking. It's an alarm waking us up to a flood of non-constructive thoughts. As soon as ...
Mar 08, 2025•33 min•Ep. 186
Most people are taught that productivity makes us feel good about ourselves, proud of our efforts. It gets linked to well-being. In truth, when we're not at peace with ourselves, we can't force productivity and if we do a lot of work, it usually leaves us tired and depleted. When we are at peace in our own minds, feeling at ease and connected to the moment, we are naturally productive because we are focused on what we’re doing, not on ourselves and trying to feel better. Support the show...
Mar 01, 2025•33 min•Ep. 185
Because thinking is how we make our way through life, we don't realize that we are always making a choice which thinking to follow and which thinking to turn away from. When we get caught up in negative thinking, and keep focused on it to try to get out of it, we are innocently holding it in place. That leads to defining ourselves as negative. We come to expect it. With understanding of how thought works, we can decide to quiet down and turn away from those thoughts. As soon as we look in a new ...
Feb 22, 2025•32 min•Ep. 184
Why does it matter that we know we are always creating our own experience of life and that only our thinking generates our reality. No two people create the identical experience. Realizing this provides us valuable information about how to sidestep disagreements, how to understand other people better, and how to "read" our own and others' moods and reactions. When we know that thinking is a creative power, we recognize it is a spiritual gift that allows us to change, and find fascination with, r...
Feb 15, 2025•34 min•Ep. 183
"Ego" is whatever we think about ourselves. Believing those thoughts can result in acting on idiotic ideas. Such thoughts are illusions we create about what we are or how we should be. Our thoughts appear real as we're thinking them, but they are no more than illusions we have created. There is no need to be frightened by illusions that will disappear as soon as we stop thinking them and turn our thoughts elsewhere. We all live in the same reality, but our experience of it is how and what we thi...
Jan 11, 2025•33 min•Ep. 182
People often think that the Principles explain why we are tempted to act on negative past thoughts when they come to mind. We try to assign blame, or rationalize that we were insecure at the time. We engage our intellect (our memories) to see how/why thinking and behaviors we wanted to put behind us came back. We find ways to use the Principles to sidestep accountability and acceptance of what is. We miss the possibility of going deeper and learning from fresh insight. Yes, thought creates our e...
Jan 04, 2025•32 min•Ep. 181
It's true that the only "reality" we experience is created by our thoughts. But it's not an excuse for acting on any and every thought we have. We've heard people who have exposure to the Principles say things like, "Yes, I probably shouldn't have done that. But when it came to mind, it was so real and compelling to me." We can't forget we have free will to act or not to act on any thought that comes to mind, and we have wisdom to guide us towards or away from our thinking moment-to-moment. It's...
Dec 07, 2024•38 min•Ep. 180
Many people struggle with decisions. What to do, what to do? The usual approach is to mull it over; consider all the options, think carefully, solicit a lot of information. Our tendency is to engage our intellect in analysis of pros and cons, advice and considerations. This kind of thinking is exhausting and frustrating. For every pro, we can think of a con. There are always new ways to look at an issue. We easily forget to depend on the gift we have for natural insight and clarity: a quiet mind...
Nov 23, 2024•32 min•Ep. 179
People sometimes assume that if they really "saw" the Principles, they would always be happy. The truth is, understanding the Principles that describe how we create experience does not lead to any particular emotional outcome; it simply leads us to accept the rollercoaster of life's ups and downs and the range of emotions we feel as they occur as natural and ever-changing. We do not need to think ourselves into reaction to our own states of mind and responses to life events. We don't need to "pr...
Nov 08, 2024•34 min•Ep. 178
Innate Health is a description of the effect of The Three Principles in action. Everyone has Innate Health; it is the pure spiritual energy of creation that is aliveness in us. It is the pure energy we bring to our experience via our power to think. The Principles have no role in what we think; they describe that we think. Innate Health is the state we experience when we are in the present moment, with a quiet mind. It is "innate" because it is natural, neutral life energy, before we add ideas a...
Oct 19, 2024•34 min•Ep. 177
It seems like anxiety is a plague of contemporary life. Anxiety is a feeling generated from our habit of constant access to an overload of information and entertainment, and the fear of missing out (FOMO in today's internet shorthand). We've lost our appreciation for stillness, for quiet moments of appreciating beauty and the delight of presence in the moment. We check our phones constantly; when we have a little time, we often open up a game or puzzle, rather than noticing our surroundings, or ...
Oct 05, 2024•32 min•Ep. 176
The higher the IQ a person has and the more they have depended on analysis and retention of information, using what they know to "figure out" what to do moment-to-moment, the harder it is for them to trust insights — fresh ideas that just pop up for us. Many of us have rejected helpful ideas we've had, inspiring new thoughts, because we hadn't analyzed the situation sufficiently to believe we could trust an unexpected insight, even if it made sense. Once we understand the way our minds work, and...
Sep 14, 2024•32 min•Ep. 175
The good news about understanding the Three Principles: We are the thinkers of our own thoughts and we can create anything. The "bad" news about understanding the Three Principles: We are the thinkers of our own thoughts; our thinking creates our reality; we are totally responsible for our moment-to-moment experience of what our life offers. For many people who have spent a lot of time telling therapists and friends about their awful pasts, or the people who have disappointed them or hurt them o...
Sep 07, 2024•34 min•Ep. 174
Chris and Judy confess to their own habitual perfectionism. We've learned from years of delving deeply into the Principles that it's just a thought not worth taking seriously, and harmless when we can laugh it off or let go of it. Thoughts that seem vitally important to our happiness or impossible standards we set for ourselves, our lives, or other people, are just ideas that we adopted at one point to feel more secure. When we understand how thought works, and the true source of and release fro...
Aug 31, 2024•30 min•Ep. 173
Anger is a warning that we are taking things personally. Anger rises up when we think that someone or something is making us upset, hurting our feelings, undercutting us, not caring how they impact us. We stop listening to what is being said and start listening to our own reactions. We feel or express defensiveness. Anger is no different from any other experience; OUR thinking creates ALL our experiences. As we come to understand that our feelings reliably tell us how well we are using our own p...
Aug 24, 2024•32 min•Ep. 172
We have talked before about the potential harm from taking diagnoses seriously. Diagnoses are a snapshot in time, not the portrait of who you are deep-down. The manual of Diagnoses the mental health professionals use is a huge catalogue naming observed behaviors of people who appear to be "mentally ill." From our perspective, they are descriptions of the individual creativity we express via our power to think, representing our most insecure thinking in low states of mind. It is never helpful to ...
Aug 03, 2024•29 min•Ep. 171
When it comes to escaping negative thinking, less is more. As we become increasingly aware of the Principles at work, we increasingly realize that we always have natural peace of mind available to us and we don't have to manage our thinking to find it. We know that bad or sad feelings are signals that tell us we are using that power against ourselves. We become comfortable with ups and downs, with thoughts coming and going and our feeling states changing as they do. We don't take negative though...
Jul 27, 2024•33 min•Ep. 170
When we have a lot of negative thoughts on our mind, they look very real and upsetting to us and we get the feeling we have to do something about them to get away from them. Or we get the feeling there must be something wrong with us, and we have to figure them out or discuss them with others to resolve them. But, as a colleague of ours often used to say, "The life of a thought is as long as you think it, not a moment longer." The strategies we come up with to escape our negative thoughts or get...
Jul 20, 2024•29 min•Ep. 169
We created this podcast live with an audience at the Three Principles conference in London. Chris was on stage in London; Judy was being broadcast from her home in Pittsburgh, appearing on a big screen on stage with Chris. People often ask how we develop ideas, how long it takes to prepare our material, etc., so we decided to show them. We asked for a subject from the audience. Someone responded quickly that he would like to hear us talk about how people know when they're ready to share their un...
Jul 06, 2024•24 min
Clients normally seek mental health help when they are facing "problems" they feel they can't resolve. A question others ask us is, "If you're not paying attention to their problems and helping them to solve them, then why do they keep coming to you?" Some people are concerned that we "brush off" problems and don't listen to our clients. Grounding in the Principles makes it natural for us to listen for and touch the innate mental health in our clients, even as they are describing their problems ...
Jun 22, 2024•32 min•Ep. 167
When people become curious about the Three Principles, they often think of our work as a tool to add to their tool kit. So sometimes it seems confusing when we make a point about not "mixing" the 3P with other approaches. The reason is that, although there are well-established approaches that do help people, the assumptions of other approaches are that people are affected by circumstances that have to be dealt with. We assume that people all have innate mental health as a birthright, even if the...
Jun 15, 2024•29 min•Ep. 166
