isn’t disturbed when the circumstances in your life are less than perfect.
It’s important to know that you were born with healthy functioning, and that it wasn’t something you had to learn. The truth is, you had to learn how to have ‘unhealthy functioning’, you had to learn to be unhappy. No one is born sceptical or negative. Self-doubt, self-criticism, negativity and pessimism are the result of negative thoughts that you have learned to take seriously. Your self-image and personality are a compilation of thoughts that you have about yourself, some of which may be negative. If you had never learned to take seriously negative thoughts about yourself, you wouldn’t experience the feelings that go along with them today. You are the sole creator of all your negative thoughts. Your thoughts have no power to harm you other than the power you give them.
Unfortunately, if you are not taught that the thoughts you have about yourself are just thoughts, you will start to believe that they describe the way you really are. The more you believe your own thinking, the more obscured your healthy functioning becomes. Poor self-esteem is healthy functioning that has been obscured with self-doubting thoughts you have learned to take seriously. Consider this: a young child wouldn’t think of asking himself, ‘Am I good enough?’ He would have to learn to ask himself such questions. Prior to learning these types of self-doubting thoughts, a child’s self-image is quite healthy and intact. If you can learn to accept negative thoughts about yourself, then you can also learn to disregard and take less seriously the negative thoughts that run through your mind. And as you do, your healthy functioning will return very quickly. As the thoughts are dismissed, a more elevated feeling will return.
Your healthy functioning is an invisible but knowable force within you. It’s not something that you can touch or prove, but then neither is a dream. Yet you know that dreams exist! The first steps in tapping into your healthy functioning are to trust that it does indeed exist, and then simply have the desire to access it. Remember, there are plenty of miraculous aspects of life that are invisible – thoughts, dreams, creativity, intuition, common sense, and wisdom.
The reason that healthy functioning may be so foreign to you is that when you are experiencing it, you usually don’t even know it. It’s such a simple, uncomplicated feeling that you don’t take notice. It’s not a feeling like excitement that you can easily describe. In fact, healthy functioning is easier to describe in its absence.
Healthy psychological functioning is the feeling you have when everything seems OK, when life seems simple and you have a sense of perspective. It’s the feeling you get when you are able to be touched by the simple things in life – watching a child playing, the leaves falling from a tree, or the motion of a door opening. When you are engaged in healthy functioning you are able to maintain a sense of internal equilibrium irrespective of what happens to be going on around you. Healthy functioning exists independently of the external parts of your life. It’s a feeling within you that you can learn to access.
Once you understand that healthy functioning is a part of you, you will open the door to noticing its presence in your life. Healthy functioning will become your normal mode of emotional functioning when you accept the fact of its existence. Think back to the last time you woke up on ‘the right side of the bed’ and you felt a sense of gratitude about your life – the last time you said to yourself, ‘Life seems magical.’ Even eternal pessimists have moments when the magic of life inspires them. Try to recall the last time something happened in your life that you wish hadn’t happened, yet you maintained a sense of perspective, you kept your cool. Why is it that sometimes you are able to maintain your sense of perspective while at other times you feel as if you are going to lose your mind? The answer is that sometimes you are tapped into your healthy functioning and sometimes you aren’t. It’s interesting to note that if you have ever felt the feeling I am describing here – your healthy functioning – then you already know that it exists. It doesn’t have to disappear into nothingness and then reappear by pure chance every once in a while. Like intuition, healthy functioning is an invisible force within you that you can call upon. It’s a feeling that you can learn to live with. You just have to know that it’s there for you and to want it to appear – and it will.
Accessing and Aligning with Strength
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could learn to live in the state of mental health that I’ve been describing? The first step in doing so is to open your mind to the possibility. I have seen it happen to so many people that I believe it can happen for you. Know that if you have ever felt peaceful during a crisis, if you have ever kept your cool when others weren’t able to do so, then the possibility exists for this to occur on a regular basis. This book is about helping you to align yourself with your healthy functioning, your inner feeling of peace and strength. In order to overcome unhappiness and become a happier, more joyful person, you must find something in your life that is more powerful and important than your unhappiness. Healthy functioning is more powerful and beautiful than any source of misery. Once you begin to recognize healthy functioning in your life, it will become the most important factor. Discovering your healthy functioning is all you need to live a genuinely happy, productive life. If a problem can’t be solved while you are tapped into your healthy functioning, then it simply can’t be solved.
Two simple facts can summarize much of what you need to know about people. We are all very different – and we are all very similar! When our personalities or thought systems are turned on, we are but one of literally billions of separate people with our own individual stories, ideas, complaints, and dramas. In this domain, there is separateness, friction, stress, strife, and lots of unhappiness. Everyone is actively thinking and, unfortunately, believing most of what they are thinking. There is a great deal of confusion in this domain because everyone thinks that their way is the ‘right’ way. But when our minds are quiet, when we are simply ‘being’, and are aligned with our healthy functioning, we are all, in a very important sense, the same, at least in the ways that really matter. We are peaceful and filled with peaceful feelings. We are understanding of our differences, loving, and kind to ourselves and to others. We see the bigger picture, the innocence in our differences, and we can access the beauty of life.
As I just said, you cannot get rid of something as powerful as unhappiness unless you have something even more powerful to replace it with – your healthy functioning. This part of you is so much more powerful than anything you could ever ‘think of’. Your healthy functioning is a place inside yourself where you can rest in your being instead of being active in your personality. It is a place of meditation – but you don’t have to meditate to get there. You only need to know that it exists – and prefer to be there – to get there. Your healthy functioning allows you to live your life from moment to moment, always doing the best that you can. It allows you to remember that the most important aspect of life is enjoying it and feeling peaceful. When you feel this way, you are truly at your best, and everything tends to work itself out – and if it doesn’t, you know that it also would have if you weren’t engaged in healthy functioning.
Once you realize that healthy functioning is something that resides within you, and is every bit as real as any other part of your life, you can begin to call on it as a resource when you need it. You must, however, treat your healthy functioning as something that does exist; it must be more than an idea to you. It must be something you trust, like intuition.
Your Thought System versus Healthy Functioning
Your thought system is concerned only with the details of your life, how you compare with others, your worldly pursuits, your intellect, your ego gratification, and your endless supply of wants and needs. You can’t satisfy your thought system. Its job is to think, compare, contrast and analyse. It is concerned with what happens in your life. The set of guidelines within which it operates is totally inconsistent with enjoyment. When you align yourself exclusively with your thought system, as so many people do, you are doomed to a life of frustration and unhappiness.
You can’t think your way to happiness, nor
