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 and confidence that from that state of mind, we'll get the answer we need.  We'll "know" and the answer will be obvious.  When we trust our innate wisdom, the experience of decision-making is simple.  We approach life with a clear head and recognize common sense when it occurs to us.  Experience with quieting down and waiting for inspiration when we face new challenges teaches us that answers will always come to us, and the feeling of certainty we get when they do assures us that they are right for us.  We all have what our colleague Christa Campsall calls "our guide inside" — the ability to listen for our own wisdom.

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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 "pretend" to be unaffected by negative events.  We ride the waves without worrying about them.  So, even when we are having negative feelings, we don't get frightened by them, or worried that they will never pass, or concerned that people will judge us.  Life, as Sydney Banks told us, is "a contact sport."  We're meant to take part and experience the thrills, the spills, the wins and the losses, the hurt and the joy as grateful participants in the experience of being a human being.  It's not necessary to fight our feelings when we don't enjoy them; they will pass as life continues to unfold.  Pain is pain; suffering is the way we are thinking about the pain.

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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 and images that then appear to be real to us in that moment.  Once people see that until we think, we are in neutral, we realize that the power to think again, to get a fresh perspective with one new thought, to have faith in the universal gift of Thought, is the power we have to come back to neutral and clear our minds and think again.  Innate Health is the fact of humanity that allows us to forgive ourselves and others for thoughts we regret acting on, or for getting stuck in negative thinking about life or people.  As soon as we "see" that, we are able to come to peace and open our minds to insights and fresh ideas.

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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 chatting with others.  When we keep our minds racing through a thicket of thoughts, we start to feel the pressure of a busy mind.  Did I miss something?  What have I forgotten to do?  Is that my phone?  I need to check my texts.  Exhausted mind.  Anxiety.

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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 we recognize that wisdom is always available to us, it's like discovering that behind the thick vegetation we thought defined the limits of our property, a lovely river flowed, offering a constant source of all the clear, fresh water we could want.  Until we knew it was there, we had to figure out how to get water every day, driving several miles to find places to fill jugs and buckets.  But when we stumbled upon a path behind the house one day and walked through it, there was the river.  It was always there for us, but we had to discover it for ourselves to believe that we would never lack for fresh water again.

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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 or made them angry, or the many reasons they have to be cynical or depressed or hopeless... the Principles at first are scary.  But it dawns on all of us that we don't need anything or anyone outside ourselves to take care of our bad feelings.  We are the thinkers creating our lives; we can turn away from dark thoughts; we can quiet our thinking and find our own wisdom; we can think anything.  We are responsible for ourselves.  That is freedom.

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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 from insecurity, then we have the option of remaining attached to habits that are harmless and enjoyable.  For example, we enjoy getting dressed up.  But if it's inconvenient, we just go where we need to go as we are.  We don't want to make mistakes, but we're over being embarrassed or crushed to discover we've made them.  Security is acceptance of our humanity.  That's the perfection that is our birthright, that comes from the peace of mind inside of us.

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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 power to think, we can sidestep bad feelings that come with taking things personally and realize that everyone is speaking from their own state of mind.  If they are insecure, their "tone" might be off; but if WE are insecure, we might hear information as personal and react, not respond.

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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 explore the details or the content of the thinking.  When we recognize insecure feelings and understand that they pass when we quiet down and leave our thinking alone, our thinking naturally comes into balance and we no longer exhibit "diagnoses."

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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 thoughts seriously or get drawn into them.  We live in the intention to find neutral and to look towards a positive feeling because the quality of our thinking in that state of mind brings us clarity and wisdom and insight.  We don't dwell on negative thoughts or try to do anything about them.

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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 rid of them just hold them in place, exacerbating the frustration of negativity.  As counterintuitive as it seems, we never have to "deal with" the content of thoughts to get it off our minds.  If we leave it alone, look away, don't take it to heart, it will pass.

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