Identification

We value negative states because of the strong sense of self we get from them. This may be very difficult for us to see, but a strong light will show us the freeing facts. No one wants to believe that he or she values things like self-pity, anger, and depression. We would insist we don't, and as evidence we point to the fact that we fight against them, but the struggle gives us a false sense of life and importance...

In a moment of crisis, would you say that you're easy-going? Are you wide-open and joyous to be with? Or, in a crisis, would you say you're about as tense as a human being could possibly be? Isn't that true? The more tense you are through resistance, the more negative you become. The more negative you become, the more resistance resists itself. And the more you resist yourself, the more tense you become. So you run left, you run right...

We have in us -- built over time as part of the construct of our personality - a literal host of demands. Things that over time have been thought over and over and over again until the construction of those thoughts becomes an unconscious attitude. For instance, if you think enough times, "Why are they doing this? I shouldn't be treated like this!" Gradually, you walk around with a chip on your shoulder, but you don't know it's a chip on your shoulder...

Any time you are sitting at home and a thought comes and says, "What about this? What about them? What's going to happen if this?" you are burdened. You are carrying on your back, in your heart, in your mind, the weight of a set of thoughts and feelings you believe have the right to ride you to where they tell you to go... as if you were saddled by a donkey!

Letting Go author Guy Finley explains the esoteric meaning of the well-known passage from scripture to "sell all and follow me." It's an illusion that we possess anything in this world - instead it is we who are possessed by the things of this world as we unconsciously derive our identity through them. Once we see through this type of identification, we understand what it is that must be "sold" inwardly speaking.

In this answer to a viewer's question, "Secret of Letting Go" author Guy Finley talks about owning your own attention for the purpose of observing the painful tendency to blame everything outside of yourself as the cause of whatever is disturbing you.

Living from our present life-level, we are almost always nervous about what's going on around us. Why? Because we still live with the mistaken notion that who we are is somehow affected or determined by what happens to us. Events may happen to you, but you are not the event. Just as clouds are not the sky, you are not what moves through you. You are not who you think you are.

In this answer to a viewer's question, "Secret of Letting Go" author Guy Finley talks about making an exercise for yourself as a reminder of your wish to not get carried away by habitual negative reactions when they appear.

In this short video, bestselling "letting go" author Guy Finley talks about how we cannot be afraid of any future moment without having first imagined what that outcome will be.

In this answer to a caller's question, Guy explains that the true purpose of interior storms, trials and challenges is to shake us loose from the painful illusions and sense of self that we unknowingly cling to.

The attempt to "save" ourselves -- to rescue and release the troubled "me" -- without first understanding just who and what this nature is that would save itself from its suffering, is the first real threshold over which the sincere aspirant must pass... since the presumption on the part of the seeker here is that he or she knows what's wrong with their life...

We have a nature that thinks about itself -- a nature that weighs itself on a scale that our culture has created and our thoughts have unconsciously adopted. Unexamined, this mind is a virtual torture device, keeping us locked within its own limitations. In the absence of practical thought (the only right capacity of the mind), there is always some painful reaction...