How can you end negative feelings without the danger of suppressing them?
Some time ago, I said to an acquaintance "It's possible to give up having negative emotions" and he said, "But if you suppress your feelings they'll just come back when you least expect them. They'll mess with your mind and make you sick." This wasn't the first time someone has responded that way to my message. Many people assume that "not having a feeling" means really having it but suppressing it. They think you can only push a feeling out of awareness not change it. Because a few of you might share this idea (or at least know people that [...]
What do you know that others think is untrue?
A few days ago I read a fascinating cover story in Fast Company magazine on Peter Thiel. Peter is a billionaire investor who co-founded PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Since then he was one of the early investors in Facebook; he later invested in LinkedIn, Spotify, SpaceX and Airbnb. He obviously has a knack for determining what makes a successful company. So when I found out he had written a book, Zero to One, I ordered it immediately and read it in one day. I learned a lot about what it takes to grow [...]
Suppressing negative emotions is unhealthy
A couple of days ago when I told someone it is possible to totally stop having negative emotions, he replied: “But if you suppress your feelings they will pop out when you least expect them, causing psychological damage, in addition to harm to your health.” This is not the first time I’ve had this response; anytime I tell people that it is possible to stop having negative emotions they always assume that the only way to not experience negative emotions is to suppress them. Because so many of you might make the same assumption, I thought that I ought to [...]
Is Buddhism correct to say suffering is inevitable?
Statue of Buddha The Buddha said that suffering is inevitable. Our experience seems to confirm that. In the course of an average week, most of us experience some emotional suffering as the result of feeling at least some unhappiness, upset, fear, or anger. To what do we almost always attribute the source of these unpleasant and painful emotions? Almost always we say the cause is something or someone outside ourselves: Losing a job or a loved one, being betrayed by a friend, lack of money, etc. We think: If only the people responsible for my upset would act [...]
How to stop arguments before they start. Guaranteed.
One of the biggest sources of unhappiness in our lives is the arguments we have with our friends and loved ones. In fact, for many people, the major source of stress in their lives is the arguments they have with friends and loved ones. Remember your last argument: You were in the middle of a calm, possibly even enjoyable conversation, when suddenly, and from out of nowhere, something happened. You don’t know what precipitated it, but without warning you found yourself upset, wondering why the other person said and did things that were so hurtful. And before you knew it, [...]
I was diagnosed with cancer last week
I want to tell you about my reaction when I was told I had colon cancer last week and how I have been dealing with the diagnosis ever since. Not because I think you are particularly interested in details about my health, but because I did something very unusual—yet something anyone can learn to do, something that can eliminate suffering from your life. Here’s the relevant background I have been visiting an oncologist (a cancer doctor) regularly for over eight years because of an earlier diagnosis of a type of blood cancer. That illness was never very serious and had been managed [...]
I was wrong about how beliefs are formed
It’s interesting how it’s possible to think you really understand something and then at some later point realize that your understanding was incomplete. It wasn’t wrong, but your new realization provides a much more accurate understanding. That’s what happened to me with the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP). What I initially thought about how beliefs are formed When I first created the LBP 29 years ago, it seemed to me that our basic self-esteem-type beliefs were formed in childhood as a result of many interactions with parents. (For more details, please see two earlier posts: https://www.mortylefkoe.com/031610/ and https://www.mortylefkoe.com/wonderful-parents/#) In some cases [...]
Can Childhood Trauma Shorten Your Life?
I recently read an article that could save your life. Over the past 18 years, Dr. Vincent Felitti and his professional partner, Dr. Robert Anda, have been researching the effects of adverse childhood experience (ACE) on long-term physical health. Childhood trauma leads to serious illnesses as adults Here are some of their conclusions: “People with ACE scores of four or higher [meaning, there were four or more adverse childhood experiences] were twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer, twice as likely to have heart disease, four times as likely to suffer from emphysema or chronic bronchitis, and twelve times [...]
You won’t look for something that you don’t think exists
If you know what you are looking for, Google and the Internet have made it possible to find information about it—whatever it is—in a matter of seconds. If you want to improve your life you can search for help in dealing with any problem you could possibly have and find thousands of sites offering help in less than a second. Because that is possible, people who offer solutions to common problems put the words and phrases that people are likely to search for (such as “improve self-esteem,” “end procrastination,” “overcome fear of public speaking,” and “how to improve relationships”) in [...]
