If you’re a blogger, or you do any other kind of writing, I’ll bet you’re familiar with the nagging worry that you “don’t have the right” to say what you’re saying.  Perhaps you’ve been writing a piece about happiness, for instance, and started wondering if it was okay for you to write it without a Ph.D. in psychology.  Or maybe you’ve just had a vague, unsettling sense that you should know or accomplish more before you put that article out there.

You’ve likely figured this out already, but getting another degree probably won’t help you overcome this feeling.  Doing that may have others see you as qualified, but it won’t do much to change your self-perception.  I know several people with advanced degrees in their fields who constantly fret over whether they’re qualified to write what they’re writing.

You’ll Never “Earn The Right”

I want to offer a different perspective in this post.  Usually, when we get the sense that we don’t have the right to do something, we assume we can fix the situation through hard work — going back to school, waiting until we’ve got more experience running our business, and so on.

For a moment, try on the possibility that “not having the right” isn’t a fixable problem.  It’s an idea you have about your basic identity as a person, much like your height or age.  To your mind, you’re a person who’s undeserving, and that’s how it’s always going to be — just as you’re never going to change, say, what country you were born in.

For me, as well as for people I’ve worked with, learning to see the issue this way has been liberating.  Although it can be distressing to realize you see yourself as undeserving, getting conscious of this belief is a major step toward letting go of it.  This awareness also allows you to give up the futile quest to “deserve what you want,” which frees up a lot of time and energy.

Who Do You Think You Are?

One reason it’s hard to give up that feeling of undeservingness is that it’s so common.  So many people are going through life believing they don’t deserve to do what they want.  When you do something ambitious or adventurous — something they’d never let themselves do — you threaten their sense of identity, and they get anxious and defensive.

I think this is why, when we start a new project, we tend to get pointed questions from others, like “who do you think you are?” and “what qualifies you to say that?”  (I suspect a lot of the anonymous, profanity-laced comments people leave on blogs are driven by the same feeling.)

When we remember these questions are fueled by a feeling of undeservingness, we can respond with compassion instead of anger.  The people who question our “right” to do what we want are going through the same doubts and fears we’ve experienced.  Hopefully, by staying on our path, we can shake up their worldview, and help them question the limits they’re putting on themselves.

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I shudder a little when I think about some of my old working habits.  One of these habits was to do what I now call “pushing the moment.”  When I’d be under time pressure, or I just wanted a task off my plate quickly, I’d tighten up my shoulders as I worked — as if I were physically trying to push the project to completion.  Not surprisingly, my shoulders used to get sore pretty often.
 
Today, when I work with someone who’s looking for focus and motivation in what they do, we often discover they’re doing the same thing.  Much of the working day, they recognize, they’re unconsciously tensing up some part of their body, as if their project is some big piece of furniture they’re trying to move across the living room floor.  No wonder work feels so painful and uninviting to them.
 
Beliefs That Lead Us To Push
 
The most obvious way to deal with the “pushing” habit is to notice it and let it go.  Every so often, as we’re working, it’s useful to scan our attention over our bodies, and notice anywhere that feels rigid.  When we become aware of the tight places, they often relax by themselves, or we can breathe into those places to help our bodies let go of the tension.
 
But for some people, this offers only temporary relief.  They become aware of the tight place and relax, but a few minutes later they’re clenching their jaw or neck again, and working again feels stifling and uncomfortable.  Sometimes, I find, people have trouble breaking the “pushing” habit because of deep-seated ideas they have about themselves and the world that could use some examination.
 
These ideas differ from person to person, but I’ll go through a few common ones.  It may be helpful to notice whether any of them resonate with you.
 
1. Work Takes Suffering.  A few people I’ve worked with have noticed that, when they relax the tense parts of their bodies as they work, they start thinking of themselves as lazy.  Somewhere along the line, they learned that, to be a responsible, hardworking person, you have to suffer while you work — “no pain, no gain.”  When they look closely at this belief and see how irrational and self-hating it is, it often unravels.
 
2. Pushing Makes Us Work Faster.  Some people tense their bodies based on the false, unconscious idea that clenching their muscles will speed up their progress — as if they’ll get more efficient if they just “put some muscle into it.”  In fact, tightening up inside just wears us out, and turns work into a more dismal chore than it needs to be.
 
3. I’ve Got To Get “There.”  In our culture, we usually don’t even consider the possibility that we can enjoy the moment-to-moment process of writing an e-mail or plugging values into a spreadsheet.  The only thing we think we’re capable of enjoying, and let ourselves enjoy, is the product of our work — the money we make, the prestige of our career, and so on.  This mindset can leave us literally aching for the reward, and not realizing how much we can make out of this moment.
 
In my experience, becoming aware of these destructive beliefs is a lot like noticing the places in our bodies where we’re holding tight.  Often, when we become aware of it, the belief — like the tension we’re holding onto — dissolves on its own.  And as it turns out, we get a lot more done when working is no longer such a physically painful process.

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A while back, I had a client—I’ll call her Jane—who, like many people I work with, was interested in a career change.  Jane had several great ideas in mind.  Unfortunately, she was also great at coming up with reasons why they wouldn’t work, and when she came to see me she was feeling pretty despondent.

We talked a bit about the possibilities Jane had considered, and why she was convinced none of them would pan out.  She couldn’t be an artist, she said, because she wasn’t talented enough.  She couldn’t be a therapist, because she didn’t want to spend all that time and money getting a degree.  She couldn’t start a new business because the economy is in a downturn.  And so on.

The more we talked, the more I started to wonder:  could anything work out for Jane, or was everything impossible?  And eventually I asked her:  “does anything look possible for you at all?”

Jane thought for a little while.  “No,” she finally said.  Oddly, although she’d just realized how bleak and hopeless the world looked to her, she gave a slight smile.  “Actually, that’s kind of silly.”

What Is A Lens?
 
In that moment, Jane caught a glimpse of what I call the lens through which she was seeing the world—the set of deep-seated assumptions she was making about her capabilities and the way other people are.  I call it a lens because, just as our glasses or contact lenses are so close to our faces we often forget they’re there, the lens we see the world through has often been around so long that we’ve come to mistake it for reality.

Jane came to me thinking her specific career ideas were unrealistic, but in fact those ideas weren’t the problem.  The problem was that she saw the whole world as a hopeless and inhospitable place.  With this worldview, of course nothing seemed possible to her.

In becoming aware of the lens she was using to see the world, Jane had a reaction I’ve seen in several other people—she started taking it less seriously.  She also realized she might even be resourceful enough to make her career ideas work out, and she’s been pursuing a new direction.

It seems that, just by becoming conscious of the assumptions we’ve been making about life that have limited us, we can start letting go of them and opening ourselves to new possibilities.  Awareness is the first and, I think, the most important step in personal growth.

Locating Your Lens
 
How do we become aware of the deep-seated ideas about the world that are holding us back?  I’ll share an exercise I use to help people think about this issue. 

To do this, take a moment and think about a task you don’t believe you can accomplish.  Maybe, for example, you have a business idea you’d like to pursue but it sounds too tough to pull off, or you’re interested in taking an aerobics class but you don’t think you have the time or energy.

Now, try completing this sentence:  “I can’t do it because the world is ________________.”  Perhaps, for instance, the world is uncaring, stingy, dangerous, stupid, or something else.  Say whatever comes to mind, without censoring or judging what you think of.

Spending a little while playing with this exercise, I’ve found, can help people get in touch with deep-rooted beliefs that influence their decisions and the results they’re getting all over their lives.  When they notice and let go of these beliefs, amazing new possibilities seem to suddenly open up.

Link Love:  Evita Ochel runs a beautifully designed series of sites featuring her photography, writing, book reviews, wellness information and more.  I was honored to be interviewed by her recently about my personal journey and future plans.

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As a former attorney, I know many lawyers.  Some of them love what they do and have always wanted to do it.  However, many others I know, although they practice in many different areas of law and their circumstances vary widely, have one thing in common:  they’d rather not be attorneys.

As many attorneys will freely tell you, they’ve never harbored a burning passion for the law, and being an attorney was not their number-one career choice.  Some have even advised their children against becoming lawyers.  Drafting motions and agreements, reviewing documents and writing nasty letters to adversaries were never high on their list of childhood aspirations.  Instead, they “fell into“ the legal profession.  That is, rather than consciously choosing the law, they “ended up in it“ through inertia or indecision.  (Vulnerable share:  this is what I did.)

How did this happen?  The reasons vary, but a few show up repeatedly.  The one I hear most often from attorneys is that they didn’t know what to do at the end of their undergraduate education, and they decided to put off making a decision by going to law school.  At the end of their legal education, many were saddled with debt, and the legal profession looked like the obvious way to pay it off.  And so began their law careers.

Similarly, others came out of college or university knowing they wanted to do something high-paying and prestigious, but lacking a specific direction.  All they knew was that they had some verbal facility and did well on the law boards, and that they weren’t comfortable with the risks that go with doing something more entrepreneurial.  Law promised status and a high, steady income, and so they “ended up“ in it.

Talent Doesn’t Necessarily Equal Direction

Another common characteristic of many lawyers I know is that they’re bright and highly motivated people.  How is it, then, that such people “fell into“ the legal profession, as opposed to choosing a career they were genuinely interested in and passionate about?  Wouldn’t we expect such ambitious and talented individuals to take conscious control of their lives?

I’ve pondered this question for a long time, and discussed it with many current and former lawyers.  What I’ve come to believe is that many attorneys “ended up“ in the legal profession, and remain there today, out of a sense of shame.  Although they considered alternative careers that sounded more inspiring, they decided, for one reason or another, that they weren’t good enough, or that they didn’t deserve, to pursue their true calling.  And the shame I’m talking about is also what’s keeping many attorneys from seriously considering a career transition.

My sense is that many lawyers’ decision (or non-decision) to “fall into“ the law, and their reluctance to try something new, are often rooted in beliefs they’ve harbored about themselves and the world since they were very young.  In my experience coaching people — many of whom have been attorneys — through making transitions, becoming aware of the ideas that are driving our choices, in our careers and elsewhere, is the most important step toward creating change.

Based on the many conversations I’ve had with dissatisfied lawyers about the reasons they entered their career, and the reasons they may be having trouble making a transition, I’ve come up with a list of the most common limiting beliefs attorneys often hold about themselves.  In this article, I’m going to describe, and take a critical look at, each of these.

If you’re an attorney interested in a career change, or you do something else but what I say here resonates with you, I invite you to examine these beliefs with me.  See if taking a hard look at them helps remove some of the mental obstacles that may have been blocking you from pursuing your true calling.

1.  I “owe“ it to others to be in a stable, high-paying profession.  Despite what some nonlawyers say about the legal profession’s ethics, we attorneys tend to have highly developed, and frequently rigid, ideas of right and wrong.  Our strong consciences help us zealously represent our clients, but they also tend to have us savagely criticize ourselves and hold ourselves to inflexible standards.

With this powerful conscience comes a sometimes overwhelming sense of obligation — to our parents, children, friends, and others.  We believe we deeply “owe“ the people around us — so deeply that we actually have a duty to design our careers, relationships and other important aspects of our lives to serve their wants.  Perhaps, for example, we owe it to our parents to take a career path they’ll be proud of, or at least one they won’t feel embarrassed by.  Maybe we owe it to our families to enter a low-risk and high-paying career, to ensure that we’ll always provide them with enough.  And so on.

If you’re a lawyer, and you recognize that you entered the law out of a sense of obligation to someone, I’m not going to try to insist or prove that you don’t owe anyone anything.  I do think it would be useful, however, to try on another perspective for a moment.  Consider the possibility that, if you dislike what you do for a living, others around you are feeling the impact of your dissatisfaction, whether you want them to or not.

This may be happening in obvious ways — perhaps you’re coming home to your family with a hair-trigger temper because of your dissatisfaction with your career, or you’re finding yourself too exhausted to spend any quality time with them.  Or perhaps the impact is subtler — maybe there’s a distance between you and your family, or others in your life, that they feel but can’t quite explain.

Now, try on the idea that, when you do something you feel passionate about, the fulfillment you experience “rubs off“ on those around you as well.  Your family and friends’ empathic sensibilities can pick up on your joy as well as your pain.  In fact, you’ve probably noticed that the mood you’re in when you’ve had a great day at work can subtly uplift even strangers you pass on the street.

Perhaps your reaction to what I’ve said is that it would be impossible for you to support yourself, or your spouse or children, doing anything but law.  If you hold this view, I invite you to simply take a hard look at it, and honestly ask yourself whether someone with your talent and motivation would really be unable to succeed doing anything else.

2.  I don’t know what I want to do.  A number of lawyers have come to me claiming they’re still doing law because they don’t know what they really want in their careers.  Interestingly, however, I often find this isn’t actually true.  What’s really going on is that they’ve learned to say they don’t know because they’re ashamed to admit their desires.  They chose law because it was a “safe,“ conventional path no one would criticize them for taking.

One of my functions as a coach is to provide a nonjudgmental environment for people to discuss what they actually want in their lives.  When I’m successful at assuring a client I won’t ridicule or shame them for telling me what they’re passionate about, they usually become willing to drop the “I don’t know“ facade and open up about what they truly desire.  It just takes a little time before they can trust me enough to confide in me.

In providing this kind of environment, I’m helping them overcome the conditioning that had them “fall into“ their present careers.  Many of us grew up being told that our dreams were selfish or silly, that we didn’t have the talent to do what we wanted, or that what we wanted didn’t matter.  Not surprisingly, many of us adapted to this kind of situation by choosing never to talk about, or pursue, what we desired.

When we finally find someone — whether it’s a therapist or coach, or just a close friend — who will listen without judgment to what we really want, we often find our calling naturally revealing itself to us without effort.  We discover, as I put it in my audio program, that “it’s okay to have wants.”

3.  I have nothing special to contribute.  Although some lawyers I’ve spoken to do know what they really want in their careers, they’re convinced that they can’t pursue their true calling because they have nothing unique or valuable to bring to the field that interests them.  Several attorneys who’d prefer to be writers, for instance, have told me they abandoned the idea because “there are so many other writers out there.“  If they couldn’t make a unique contribution doing what they prefer, they concluded, they might as well do a job with decent pay.

One thing I often notice about people who tell me they have “nothing special to contribute” to some field is that they haven’t really tried.  The attorneys who told me they’d rather be writers, for example, had never actually tried writing professionally (except, of course, for drafting agreements and legal papers).  If this objection comes up for you, I’d recommend at least trying out what you want on a part-time basis, or recreationally, to get an idea of the quality of work you can actually produce.  Better yet, commit to another person — whether it’s a coach, friend or family member — to explore your outside interests, and request that they hold you to that commitment.

But more importantly, really consider these questions:  why does everything you do need to be unique and special?  Why do you hold yourself to this standard?  What do you fear would happen if you didn’t produce something groundbreaking in your work?  Would people ridicule you, or get angry, or harm you in some way?  Taking a serious look at these questions often loosens the grip this “need to be special” has on you.

I’ve worked with several people who felt reluctant to make a career transition because they doubted their ability to make a “unique contribution.”  In almost every case, when they closely examine their belief that every piece of work they produce must be revolutionary and cutting-edge, they start taking it less seriously.  If the need to “be special” is holding you back from pursuing your goals, I invite you to do the same kind of self-examination.

4. Marketing my goods or services would be sleazy.  I’ve known a number of attorneys who were interested in doing something more entrepreneurial, ranging from starting their own businesses making quilts to selling financial products on commission.  However, another common feature of lawyers’ mindset seems to be a disdain for selling things.  To many attorneys, there is something crass, manipulative or pedestrian about promoting products or services.  Here’s another vulnerable confession:  I even felt a little anxiety as I was designing this site’s marketing, for the same reasons.  “Oh, how low I’ve fallen,” I despaired for a moment.  “I’m hawking my wares on the Internet.”

The number of legal restrictions on lawyer advertising that exist everywhere is a testament to this belief’s power.  Similarly, I often hear lawyers belittling successful entrepreneurs, wondering how people with neither law degrees nor academic honors (or, like Bill Gates, not even college diplomas!) could make more money than most senior law firm partners.  And don’t get attorneys started on celebrities who became millionaires simply by looking attractive, without ever drafting a single Motion for Summary Judgment or Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement.

Despite this prevailing attitude, I think most attorneys would acknowledge that it’s at least okay to truthfully market a service or product that’s actually of decent quality.  If you think you can start your own business and create something worthwhile — and I suspect that someone with your talents and intelligence can do so — there’s nothing sleazy about telling people about it.

More importantly, if you find yourself limited by this attitude, consider this question:  do you really believe self-promotion is shameful, or is that just something you tell yourself to excuse the choices you’ve made?  If you abandoned your dream of entrepreneurship for law or some other more “stable” career path, it’s comforting to believe you did that to avoid manipulating others or demeaning yourself.  But can you honestly accept that belief?

5. Everything will be okay when I’m wealthier.  Some attorneys I know, although they’re unsatisfied with their careers right now, believe their quality of life will significantly improve once they start making more money.  This is particularly true for associates at large law firms who believe they have a decent shot at “making partner” within a few years.  The reasons lawyers hold this belief vary.  Some, for instance, think more money will give them access to enough material rewards that they’ll become satisfied with their lives.  Others plan to retire early, and spend the rest of their lives with their families financially free.

Unfortunately, in my experience, even when attorneys meet their financial goals, they find themselves saddled with the same sense of emptiness that plagued them when they started out.  What’s more, money does little to heal the rifts in their personal relationships.  In the end, no matter how much money they make, how many junior people they get to supervise, and how many important people they get to hobnob with, wealth and status simply don’t seem to “make everything okay.”

It took me a long time to finally acknowledge that no material reward can really fill the emptiness many of us — lawyers or otherwise — experience within ourselves.  That this was hard for me to see is no surprise, since — as with many other attorneys — the reason I entered my legal career was ultimately to garner enough money and prestige to feel adequate. The only way we can come to terms with this emptiness, or sense of lack, is to be willing to silently sit with it and fully experience it, rather than running or trying to distract ourselves from it.

I offer several guided meditations for this purpose in my book and audio program, but just sitting alone in silence can help us get intimate with and ultimately transcend the feeling of inadequacy that may be nagging us in the background.

(This is Part One of a two-part series.  In Part Two, I’m going to dive into the practicalities of transitioning out of the legal profession, based on my own experiences and those of other ex-lawyers I know.)

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I don’t just mean that the sensations we experience influence our moods—I’m not simply pointing out that, say, discomfort in our bodies makes us feel irritable.  I mean that what we’re feeling affects aspects of our thinking like our opinions of others, our beliefs about what we can achieve in the world, what we want to do with our lives, and so on.  What we think is often just a reflection of the physical sensations inside us, even if those feelings are outside our conscious awareness.

The Massage That Changed My World

This point hit home for me a while ago when I decided to do something adventurous and got what’s called a Maya abdominal massage.  Right before I came in for the massage, I was fretting over how much trouble I seemed to have calling people about possible speaking engagements.  I’d get all geared up to call a bookstore or university to see if I could give a talk there, and I’d feel blocked by anxiety.  What if the people I called thought the idea of booking me as a speaker was ridiculous?  I’d start to wonder.  I’d probably just be bothering them.

As soon as the masseuse’s hands touched my stomach, I noticed it felt very tight and sensitive, and I started chuckling as if I were being tickled.  The intensity of the sensations quickly grew, and after a few minutes tears were streaming from my eyes and I was alternately laughing and coughing.  Afterward, my stomach muscles felt deeply relaxed and still.  I noticed the most remarkable effect of the massage, however, a few hours later.

When I got back to work, my mind returned to the problem of looking for speaking engagements.  I was surprised to notice that the tension that used to arise in my body when I thought about making the calls was gone.  Seeking out opportunities to give a talk seemed completely natural, as if I’d been doing it all my life.  I calmly went to the phone and started dialing.

Until this event, I thought massages did nothing more than relax you for a little while.  I was amazed to find that the massage had actually changed my beliefs about the world.  Somehow, the tightness I used to have in my abdomen had been creating anxiety when I’d try to book myself as a speaker, and the belief that it “just wouldn’t work.”  Now, it was as if releasing that tension had actually changed the world around me, and opened up possibilities that hadn’t existed before.

Using Our Bodies To Change Our Thoughts 

I’ve noticed similar results in working with clients.  One man I worked with, for instance, wanted to ask his boss if he could work in a different group within his company, but felt too scared to make the request.  As we talked, I noticed he was breathing shallowly into his upper chest, and I asked him to experiment with taking deeper breaths into his stomach.  Remarkably, when he started breathing more deeply, he reported that he felt more confident, and he no longer saw asking for the change he wanted as so frightening.

Psychologists, particularly in the field of “somatic” or “body” psychotherapy, have long understood the relationship between the sensations in our bodies and the way we perceive the world, and based their techniques on that relationship.  For example, in The Body In Psychotherapy, psychologist Edward W. L. Smith describes how he helps patients see that the way they hold their bodies—their posture, their breathing, the muscles they tighten, and so on—influences their emotional lives:

If I notice that a patient is holding a body part in a peculiar way, I sometimes rearrange the holding pattern and ask her or him what it is like to be in the new position. To facilitate this awareness I may have the person go back and forth between the two postures several times for comparison. . . . So, by inviting the patient to move out of a particular posture, . . . one can facilitate the patient’s awareness, experience and flow of emotion.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that changing negative beliefs is basically an intellectual exercise.  If we have a belief about the world that’s holding us back, it’s often said, we need to logically convince ourselves that it’s false.  For example, from this perspective, my client who was having trouble asking to switch groups within his company needed to convince himself that nothing terrible would happen to him if he made the request.  By changing his usual pattern of thinking, he could rid himself of his anxiety.

This seems to be a product of our society’s overwhelming focus on using the mind and logical reasoning.  As psychologist James I. Kepner writes in Body Process: Working With The Body In Psychotherapy, “our theories and methods have traditionally attached little importance to body phenomena in the context of psychotherapy,” and “at its root this is a reflection of the extreme emphasis on intellect and reason in our culture at large.”  However, although changing the way we think can help us get unstuck, I’ve found it isn’t always what’s needed.

Sometimes, the best solution is to check in with how we’re feeling in our bodies.  If there’s tension or discomfort somewhere, doing something to relieve that feeling may do more to help us think more positively than any amount of thinking and reasoning.  It’s surprising how much a change in our posture, movements, or breathing can do to change how we see the world.  The way we feel inside can create our thoughts—not just the other way around.

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We often forget what prompted us to buy into these identities, and even that we existed before we had these beliefs at all.  When asked how they decided that all of these hurtful notions about themselves are true, many people will simply respond “I just know” or “it’s always been that way.”  But there must have been some moment when we decided, or some period of time in which we gradually concluded, that certain beliefs about ourselves are true.  At the very least, when we were embryos in our mothers’ wombs, it’s unlikely we were suffering from self-esteem problems.

I used to have many painful ideas about myself—most notably, that I was too shy or strange to deal with people, and that people generally just wanted me to leave them alone.  Although I was attached to these harmful identities, on some level I knew I couldn’t have believed in them all my life.  There must have been some point in time when I decided they were true.  What was life like before I started thinking these terrible thoughts? I wondered.  But each time I’d try to remember my experience of the world before these beliefs, my mind would simply draw a blank.

A while back, I happened to read about a Zen koan, or saying, that goes “show me your original face before you were born.”  Not surprisingly, my initial reaction to this was “that makes no sense—I didn’t exist before I was born.”  But I also noticed that, when I seriously pondered what I was like “before I was born,” I experienced a peaceful emptiness in my mind.  Most importantly, all the negative thinking I usually did about myself, in that moment, disappeared as if it had never been there.  For a few seconds, I was free of my limiting identities.

I was fascinated by the peace the koan brought me, and for a few months I regularly thought about it, hoping for a deeper understanding of its meaning.  One sleepless morning at about four a.m., I finally came to a realization.  In the words “before you were born,” “you” means your identity—the beliefs you’ve formed about yourself and who you are in the world.  You “gave birth” to your identity when you made decisions about who and what you were.  The purpose (or, at least, one purpose) of the koan is to show us we existed—we had an “original face”—before we adopted any beliefs about ourselves.  We are not our beliefs, in other words—we are their creator and believer.

When we contemplate the koan, we get a firsthand experience of what life was like before we developed all these harmful ideas about ourselves.  As I discovered for myself, that identityless state gifts us with a peace and freedom we rarely experience in our lives.  At first, when we try to remember what we were like before we adopted our identities, we feel like we’re “drawing a blank,” not coming up with anything.  However, we only see it that way because we’re so accustomed to having all these thoughts about ourselves, and in the identityless state those thoughts don’t arise.  In fact, that calm blankness is who we were before we decided we were this or that.

I also recognized that, whenever I wanted, I could return to the peace of my “original face.”  Whenever I started running myself down, replaying memories of difficult interactions with others, or generally thinking negatively, all I had to do was remember how I experienced life before I adopted the harmful beliefs.  This memory gave me more than pleasant nostalgia—it actually put me back into the tranquil emotional state of my very early life.

In that state, life took on a joyful and effortless quality.  Without all my ideas about my limitations as a person, the anxieties about relating with people that used to trouble me simply faded away.  Spiritual teacher Osho’s description of this state in Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously captures its essence well:  “Just be what you are and don’t care a bit about the world.  Then you will feel a tremendous relaxation and a deep peace within your heart.  This is what Zen people call your ‘original face’—relaxed, without tensions, without pretensions, without hypocrisies, without the so-called disciplines of how you should behave.”

As always, I’ll offer an exercise to help others experience the peace this practice has brought me.  If negative beliefs about yourself have been limiting you, try the following.  When some harmful idea about yourself arises—for instance, “I’m too scared to do this,” “I’m not an interesting person,” “people are going to mock me if I try this,” and so on, pause what you’re doing for a moment.  Ask yourself when you decided that this was true.  Then, see if you can recall how you felt before you developed this hurtful notion.

You may, like many people, experience the feeling that your idea has “always been true”—that you’ve “always” been inadequate, unattractive, not smart enough, or something else.  If this happens, ask yourself how you felt when you were an infant, before you were born, or—if those two questions yield the same answer—before you existed.  As you inquire into how you thought about yourself further and further back in time, you’ll eventually come to a point where your mind becomes blank—where you can’t come up with anything you believed or felt about yourself.

Don’t give up here simply because you don’t think you can remember anything—allow the blank sensation to persist, and hold your attention on it.  As you simply give the emptiness permission to be, you may find a sense of calm and focus pervading you.  This is the experience of your “original face”—your natural state before you learned to label yourself in limiting ways.  You can return to it any time you feel restricted by your thinking.

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