If you are afraid of being rejected by someone and you approach that person with the intention of winning their acceptance, you are skating on thin ice. You will come to see that any behavior pattern based upon the avoidance of pain becomes a doorway to the pain itself. Your entire personality is built upon ways of being, thinking, acting, and believing that were developed to avoid this pain. This pain is so uncomfortable, so challenging, and so destructive to the individual self, that your entire life is spent avoiding it. Once you can face your disturbances, you will realize that there is a layer of pain seated deep in the core of your heart. Watch all of its noise about how hurt you are, and how could anybody do that. It simply means that you are ready, willing, and able to watch your mind create its little melodrama. You will then naturally fall behind the mind because you have always been there.Дoes that mean that you stop your mind from going around in circles trying to figure out whatвЂ™s going on? No. You, the one inside watching the neurotic mind, just relax.

Work can be fun family can be fun you can just enjoy all of it. You can wake up in the morning, look forward to the day, and not worry about what will happen. You are capable of ceasing the absurdity of listening to the perpetual problems of your psyche. If you want to be free, you have to learn to treat it like any other addiction. It is constantly making demands of you, and you have devoted your life to serving these demands. Your current relationship with your psyche is like an addiction. It is all so easy to see once you step back and dare to look at it honestly. That relationship will have problems because your problems are what caused the relationship. You began with a problem inside yourself, and you tried to solve it by getting involved with somebody else. That is why people have so much trouble with relationships. Self-consciousness, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety-they are all fear. Your psyche is communicating through its universal language: fear. Just about anything can upset the psyche. The only reason that you think about your psychological well-being so much is because it has not been okay for a very long time. This state of affairs is so prevalent that you donвЂ™t see it, just as a fish doesnвЂ™t see the water. You are either trying to stop suffering, controlling your environment to avoid suffering, or worrying about suffering in the future. Your inner sensitivities expose you to a minute-to-minute, constant situation in which you are suffering to one degree or another.

All of these things burden us tremendously. We fear that people will turn on us, take advantage of us, or stop loving us.

We experience insecurity, anxiety, and self-consciousness. We fear that we are not good enough or that we will fail. SingerД®very day we bear a burden that we should not be bearing.

The untethered soul book summary