Well-being and inner-clarity don’t arise from amassing new beliefs and knowledge. This optimal state of being rises from questioning the mind and letting go of what we think we know.
Cognitive Behavior Therapy has become one of the predominant therapeutic modalities in modern psychology.
- Its many benefits have been document by extensive research.
Humans have a biological tendency toward unhelpful and often irrational thinking?
- Our beliefs about life can quickly fall into the traps of “all or nothing” thinking.
- Jumping to conclusions, fortune telling, and focusing on the negative.
CBT uses reason as a corrective tool to question the often irrational beliefs that tend to permeate our thinking.
Re-source: Reconsider
3 primary tools for disputing our stressful thoughts. (from “Learned Optimism” by Martin Seligman)
- Learn to recognize the automatic thought flooding through your consciousness.
- Learn to dispute the automatic thoughts my marshaling contrary evidence.
- Learn to make different explanations (re-attributions) and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.
Whether you call it enquiry, not knowing, beginner’s mind, or Cognitive behavior therapy is not important. The power of this age old practice arises in its benefits.
- When you question you stressful beliefs and stories, you begin to see that these ordinary mental habits of catastrophizing, fortune telling, and focusing of the negative have no real basis in reality.
- You see that stress often arises from stories made up in the mind.
Turn the thought around. Consider its opposite.
- Find at least three specific, genuine examples of how each turnaround is true for you in the situation.
craving and resource from “Start Here” – Master the lifelong habit of well-being – by Eric Langshur and Nate Klemp
