Problem Solving, the Easy Way: Webinar Replay
Mary Schiller, a Three-Principles coach, explains why intensely focusing on problems makes them harder to solve. She shows how recognizing that problems come from moment-to-moment thinking, not external reality, creates space where solutions appear. Two shifts: see problems as temporary thoughts, and when urgency spikes, take a timeout instead of diving in.
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Hello everybody, it is Wednesday, July 20th. I believe that's today. It is 10 AM here in New York City and I see a few of you have joined. So if you can hear me, I would love it if you would just type a note into the chat box so I know that I'm coming through loud and clear. And let's see, it looks like we have Lynn, Kathy, Gavin. Great, thank you, I appreciate that, Kathy. I will start the presentation in just about 30 seconds. I'll give people a chance to arrive, but let me just start by saying that I'm very grateful to have you here with me today. I had an interesting experience this morning in that I got up very early to do a radio program for a station in the UK, so if I look a little bit more tired than usual, that would explain it since it was for their morning show, so it was quite early here in New York City. So I will go ahead and get started. Let me introduce myself. My name is Mary Schiller, and I am a Three Principles-based coach and the author of two books. One is called The Joy Formula and the other is called Mind Yoga. I also have an academy online with lots of online classes called the Mind Yoga Academy. And I teach Mind Yoga workshops to individuals and groups virtually all over the world. And I feel very privileged to be able to do that. So this webinar is all about how to solve any problem and solve it much faster and much easier than you might believe possible. And this is going to be a very interactive conversation. It's just me on camera, no fancy slides, and anytime you have a question or comment, you can feel free to post it into the chat box and we'll make it a very interactive conversation. And I'll have a few questions for you along the way as well. And we should go for about 45 minutes, and that should give us plenty of time to go through what I would like to share and to answer any questions or comments that you may have. So thank you for being here. I was spurred to offer this webinar today for a few reasons, and I think the main reason is that in my coaching work with people and also in just observing myself, I noticed that people can often get stuck in one or two areas of their life where they just feel like they can't move forward. They feel like there's something holding them back and they're not really sure how to kind of get around this thing. It almost looks like a physical obstacle to them. So if you'd be so kind and you feel like sharing this for yourself, I'd love to know what prompted you to sign on to this webinar today, and if there is a, a problem or problems in your life that seem like they just can't be solved, or that they've been sort of hanging around for a long time and you can't quite get around them. So if you'd like to share that in the chat box, that would be superb. I can share a couple of mine with you. Before I came across the understanding that I now have of something called the 3 principles, for me, one of the biggest areas of my life that was problematic was stress by far. I was a very anxious person. I was, um, pretty much consumed every day by stress. I had a lot of thoughts about money that kept me awake at night. And I also was just generally stressed by pretty much anything going on, whether it be work, or even just a simple thing like my commute to work would sometimes— I'd sometimes feel stressed And as a result of having all that stress, a lot of the sort of day-to-day things that I had to deal with sometimes seemed very hard for me to cope with. So one area of my life that was a particular struggle was just generally my finances. I would get very anxious if I had to do anything related to managing money or doing my taxes. And I couldn't seem to figure out how to do those things very well. It was a real struggle for me to approach those topics with any sort of a clear mind. And I really, really felt stuck. I felt like somewhere along the line, I had missed that lesson in life or something, and that everybody else knew how to do it better than I did. Gavin has an issue with smoking for 58 years. Oh my goodness, Gavin, that's a long time. Time, and I can see why you find that stressful. I have had many friends and acquaintances who have tried to quit smoking and have really struggled with that. So I think what we're going to talk about today is going to be helpful in that regard. At least I hope it will. So I really was caught in what seemed like a vicious circle inside myself, especially related to financial matters. Where I would, you know, focus on the problem and try to solve it. You know, let's say there was some kind of cash flow problem and I would just focus all of my attention on it. I would do other things that people told me to do, you know, to manage my money and, and things like that. And I tried to change my money mindset and I spent money on programs like that, ironically. But I couldn't seem to solve this problem of feeling really stressed out about money and therefore not managing it very well. Another area of my life that was an area that seemed pretty insurmountable for quite a long time was my marriage. My husband and I had some pretty serious problems a few years back. We've been together now for 19 years. We're still married. But about, let's see, 5 years ago, 4 to 5 years ago, we were really struggling to the point where we separated for a time. And it really wasn't until sometime last year, I would say, that I started to figure out what had really happened back then and why we felt so stuck in our relationship. So tell me if this sounds familiar to you by a show of hands in the chat box. You'll have some kind of problem that you're trying to come up with a solution for. You, you know, focus a lot of attention on it. It takes up a lot of space in your mind and during your day. You may try to make decisions regarding this specific problem or come up with a solution by writing, you know, pros and cons lists and things like that. And you may also just sort of keep pushing on this particular thing. I can think of another area where I used to struggle with something that seemed like it was never going to move, and that was in the area of writing. I had always made my living as a writer, so it seems odd that I would have a problem around that. But when it came to writing my own books and not writing for other people, that seemed like something that I just wasn't able to do. You know, I would, I would try to do it and I would try to push through it, but I couldn't make that block go away. And I kept thinking that if I just, you know, focused my attention on it and I gave it a lot of presence in my mind, that that would be the thing that would help me to solve the problem. And what I've learned recently is that like most people, and perhaps like you, I was making an innocent mistake when I was trying to solve problems. And that was that, as counterintuitive as it may seem, really focusing in on a problem and trying to find a solution for it is about the least effective way to actually find a solution for it. I've seen this happen over and over again, especially in workplaces where I've been, and maybe this sounds familiar to you. If it does, you know, give me a shout in the chat box, where a group or a team or an organization will have a problem that they're trying to solve. So what they do is they generally will have some sort of meeting, or they'll have a brainstorming session where everybody sits down in a room, writes out their ideas on a whiteboard, you know, they look at everybody's suggestions, and then they decide on a course of action. Or they might go through this kind of thing several times. There might be a series of meetings like this where people You know, input, input, input, and then there's some kind of output at the end. And I don't know about you, but I can't really think of many examples in the workplaces where I've been where that actually resulted in a good solution to whatever we were dealing with. Most of the time, it would be sort of a short-term fix that may have looked like a permanent solution, but it never really was. And before long, people were kind of back in the same sort of circular patterns and thinking patterns and behavior patterns as they were before. And I never really understood why that didn't work, because it seemed like, gosh, we have all of us sitting in a room together, you know, we're all focused on this one problem that we're trying to solve, you know, where our brains are very active and we're contributing all these ideas, you know, why isn't this actually working? You know, why aren't we able to come up with a real answer to the problem that we're all facing? You know, looking back and seeing that those things never worked, and I didn't understand because it seemed very logical. It seemed logical because that's what I was doing in my own life as well. I would have this problem, like, you know, with managing my finances or in my relationship or in my creative life. And I would, you know, have times where I would just sit down and go, all right, I'm going to solve this today. Today is the day I'm going to solve this problem. I'm going to, you know, write out a bunch of ideas of, in, in the, in terms of my relationship, you know, what Jeff and I could do differently in terms of interacting with each other, you know, Maybe we need to spend more time being, you know, just one-on-one together, you know, going out on dates and things like that. And I would come up with plans and lists and all sorts of things, and none of it ever worked. None of it ever worked. So about 2 years ago, as some of you on this webinar watching the replay may know— hi, Lynn— That's what you say every morning. Today's the day I solve this, right? That can be a very kind of disheartening place to be. And I'll get to the solution in a second. It can be very disheartening to wake up day after day with the same thing kind of hanging over your head. And you keep wondering, you know, what is it that I am either doing wrong or that I'm not doing that is making this thing sort of hang around and hang around and hang around. And, um, you know, about 2 years ago, as some of you know, I came across what we call the 3 principles, and I've been coaching people on these principles since then. But I have to say that it really wasn't until about a year ago that I finally started to see how a specific part of understanding these principles is very, very, very useful in solving problems, even problems that seem like there maybe isn't a solution, or that have been hanging around for so long that they just seem like they're part of your life and you just got to accept that they're there. That's pretty much the conclusion that I had come to at one point was that, okay, well, in terms of money, I guess I'm just always going to be stressed about money and I'm never going to be able to manage it well, and I just need to accept that about myself. Or with my marriage, I remember having the thought of, okay, well, I don't really know how to take our marriage to the next level. I don't really know how to solve this. So, you know, maybe this is just as good as it's going to get, and I should just be grateful that we're still together. And, you know, just kind of resign myself to being accepting of whatever the situation was. And I had a lot of people, professionals even, in the past telling me that, you know, there were certain things in life that you just had to accept. And, you know, once you accepted them and kind of moved on, that was the best you can do. And I didn't really buy that. I guess I didn't accept that. Ironically, that just seemed wrong to me, but I couldn't really figure out what to do instead. So about a year ago, I remember I had just completed a class with Michael Neal, who is a well-known coach and author in the Three Principles. And some things have started to shift in my life after taking this class with him that was called Creating the Impossible. And I started to, to sort of experience a very different way of, A, looking at problems, and B, looking for solutions. So these two components I feel are really, really important to understand. So I'll go through the first one with you, which is looking at problems in a very different way. So I noticed that going back to my marriage, since that's sort of the primary one that I was struggling with, I noticed that sometimes my marriage actually seemed great. There were some days that I observed where I felt very close to my husband and I had very, very warm feelings about him and about us and about the life we had created together. And I noticed that on those days, it didn't really look like I had a problem. But then on other days, it looked like I had a big problem. I had problems like, you know, we don't talk enough, or we're, we're, we feel kind of apart and separate from each other. We don't really feel like a team. And I really want to have a team in my marriage. And, you know, I started to really look at things from the vantage point of, you know, We've got all these things wrong with our relationship, and how are we going to fix them? And I just started paying attention to the fact that some days things looked fine and other days they didn't. I started noticing that, you know, was it, was it dependent on something I was doing in the relationship? Was it dependent on something he was doing? And what I saw was that it wasn't dependent on any of that. The only thing that made it look like a big problem one day and not a problem another day was whatever state of mind that I just happened to randomly be in. And this sounds kind of like, well, duh, you know, but honestly, it was pretty revelatory for me. I had never really stopped to consider that problems could actually exist or not exist based solely on whatever thinking was going through my brain at any given time. And by that point in my understanding of these principles and how thought works, I was realizing that thought was very random. That I really couldn't control it, I couldn't predict it, and I couldn't really manage it. That thought was kind of just doing what it was doing, and I was kind of along for the ride, and that I didn't really have to get engaged with whatever thoughts came through my mind if I didn't feel like it. So in seeing this really interesting pattern in myself, kind of stepping back for a moment and watching what was going on, I started to ask myself a fundamental question, which was, is there anything that I can really— that can really be called a problem if it's totally dependent on whatever thinking I'm listening to on any given day? And I'm pausing because that was very big for me. And I don't know if that's hitting you in the same way that it hit me, but it wasn't like I was denying that some days I felt like I had a problem. It was more like I saw the origin of that problem, was not something outside of me, but was actually something inside of me. And once I saw that, things that had looked insurmountable started to look like they had as much substance as air, because thought doesn't have any weight to it. So that was my first big shift. Shift in seeing what problems actually were was understanding that they were coming from momentary— that's a very key word— momentary thinking that I was having, that I was giving weight to and listening to. And other days, maybe those thoughts weren't coming in, or if they were, I just wasn't listening. And the second thing, which was really what was on my mind when I set up this webinar was, okay, let's say there is something that I do want to change about my life. You know, maybe I don't necessarily have to see it as a quote-unquote problem, but let's say there is something that I want to be different. Let's say that I do want my marriage to be different. I want it to have some new spark in it. Or let's say that I do want to find my creative self and be able to write my own books and things. You know, how do I do that then if I no longer really see these things as problems to be solved? Then what do I do? Well, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, most of us look at problems, problems, and we think we have to sort of dive into them and that somewhere in there through recombining old ideas or something, we're going to find the answer. And so we spend a lot of time focusing, focusing, focusing. And what I found out in the last, particularly the last 6 months, is that is not an effective way to solve even very big problems. And what I found, excuse me, that is really helpful instead is not necessarily ignoring them, but if I have any sense of urgency about something, I immediately take a timeout and I say to myself, okay, I've got some really intense and powerful thinking going on about this, about this stuff. I'm not going to find a solution when I'm in this kind of stressed state of mind. So I'm just gonna let this thinking move on through, go on by, and wait for some space to open up. And I can't even begin to tell you what a difference it's made, not only in terms of finding answers to long-standing questions and problems but also just in the general quality of my daily life. So I'm no longer following the urgent, you know, white rabbit in my mind who's telling me I need to go down this hole and that maybe the answer that I'm looking for will be in there. I'm not doing that anymore. What I'm doing instead is I'm seeing the rabbit kind of, you know, saying, time's running out, time's running out. And I'm kind of going, yeah, maybe not though. You know, I don't really want to listen to that today. I think that there might be something else for me to listen to other than that urgent prodding sort of sensation that we can get sometimes. So I'd like to pause there, and I'll continue on the second point But I'm wondering if you want to type something in the chat box, if there's anything in what I've said that has resonated with you in terms of particularly how one day something can seem like a very big deal and another day it doesn't even cross your mind. And, you know, that's really what got me wondering about what problems actually were. And whether or not I needed to even approach them the same way that I had been. So I would love to hear, Kathy, I hate having things hanging over my head. So if I know I have to deal with it, it's hard not to. I really get that. I really get that. And what I think I saw for myself, and I'm hoping this is helpful to you, is that if I had the sense that something was hanging over my head and that I had to urgently deal with it, it wasn't actually true. It wasn't actually true that I could be— I was being tricked by kind of stressful, urgent thinking that was telling me, this is something you must deal with right now, Mary. You have to deal with this right now. I started experimenting with that. And I started asking myself, do I really, do I really have to deal with this thing right now? Is this really hanging over my head? Or is it just a thought-created illusion that I'm believing right now that makes things look that way, but they actually aren't that way? And I would say probably 95% of the time maybe 100% of the time actually, when I had that kind of sensation, it really wasn't true. Hello there, I'm not sure what your name is, maybe it's Dawn. It's interesting to observe that a problem at 8:00 AM has been forgotten by 9:00 AM and that my mood changes multiple times during the day. Exactly. Lynn says, there's been such a sense of urgency or time's running out thinking going on. At the end of the day, I'm exhausted trying things, solutions that don't pan out. It's been very frustrating. So I would say to address that, it's simply noticing that that sense of urgency, that feeling of stress and pressure— Kathy is saying it might be self-induced, but the still thing, the thing still has to be done. Exactly. So here's where I'm going with this. So it's important to notice that that sense of urgency, that stressful feeling that you get is really an illusion that you don't have to listen to. And when you see that, and when you can go, you know what, my thinking right now is telling me that I should be stressed and pressured, but what happens if I just don't listen to it? What happens if I just don't listen to it? And I can't even begin to explain the incredible difference this has made for me. Because when you do that, when you simply say, you know, I don't really feel like listening to that kind of stressful thinking right now. And you kind of look away from it. What you do is you look in a new direction, which is where the solution actually is. It's where the solution actually is. So when that feeling of stress is lifted off, It's like the blinders come off as well. And the thing, Kathy, that has to get done suddenly either can be done by someone else, or as Don just said, maybe it doesn't need to get done at all, or an answer will become so obvious you may wonder why you didn't see it sooner. This has happened to me so many times, it's almost embarrassing. It's almost embarrassing where, you know, like with my relationship with my husband, let's say when I first started to try this out and I would say to myself, I'd have that stressful, gosh, I really got to solve this problem with him today. It's just really getting to me, whatever it happened to be at that time. And, and instead of kind of diving in there with those things and feeling like this was something very urgent, I just would step back from it and I'd go, No, I don't really feel like doing that today. I don't really feel like being in that urgent state of mind. So where else can I be? And it was so interesting because things that had been problematic between us just kind of gently started to fall away. You know, we used to argue quite a bit, ironically, or maybe not ironically, about finances. And I noticed that my stress around money started to fade, and then our conversations about money started to fade away, and it was replaced by a sense of ease where if something came up that we did need to deal with that still had to get done related to money or finances, we were in a much better emotional and mental place to allow that to happen. I can give you a perfect example of that which happened earlier this year where we had some very unexpected large bills that we had to deal with, and we were really, um, for about maybe 2 or 3 minutes, both of us were in that urgent state of mind, like, oh my gosh, this is really a disaster, what are we going to do, what are we going to do? And we were kind of staring at each other and panicking and going, oh my gosh, this is terrible. You know, this is like the worst thing ever right now. What are we going to do? And then after about 2 or 3 minutes, we looked at each other and said something like, you know, we don't have to listen to all that stress and urgency at the moment. We can take a step back from that and just kind of let those thoughts go by. And see what comes up. And within about a half an hour, we had an idea that, interestingly enough, was the same idea. We both came to the same conclusion. We didn't know if it would really work, so we made a couple of calls to see if it would work. And within an hour, we had a solution to a problem that really looked like there was no way out. It really looked big and like scary and awful. And literally within 60 minutes, we had it sorted out. So that was a really poignant example to me of how this can actually work in real life, not just in theory. I think that where people can get tripped up a little bit is that we can sometimes feel like if we're taking our eye off the ball, as they say, you know, if we take our focus off of, of something that looks like a problem we have to solve, that it's not going to get solved and it's going to get just get bigger and bigger and bigger. Is that what it seems like, um, to any of you on this webinar today, that if you take your eye off the ball that it's going to drop or something bad is going to happen? Lynn, yep. I used to be that way myself where I was really like if I am not focused on this thing, it's just going to get out of control and, you know, it's just going to get worse and then I'm going to have to come back later and deal with it and it's just going to be a bigger mess. And I'm happy to tell you that in the year or so that I've been kind of playing with this, I've found that just the opposite is true. And that, yeah, especially finances, Lynn, I can so relate to that. Where I had always felt like if I wasn't like hyper-digital, uh, vigilant and diligent about certain aspects, particularly of finances, that things were just going to completely disintegrate before my eyes. And we have had personally some pretty big ups and downs in that area over the last 9 months. Through things that were not in our control, because how much of life is in our control anyway? And I've just noticed that the less that I, um, give any weight to thoughts like, this is a big problem, or this is serious, or I have to do something about this today, the more easily the answers come to me. For what to do. And I've also noticed that the solutions that come to me in that clear-headed space are much more leveraged, they're much more effective, and they're much easier for me to sort of execute. I'll give you a really kind of funny example of something that happened just this week. This was really, really funny. So I was struggling with a certain area related to my coaching business, and I felt like I was just going around and around and around in circles on it. This was Sunday night, and I was just really in that state of, ah, and I saw myself there, saw myself there, and I went, oh yeah, okay, I don't need to go there. I know this looks really urgent for a lot of reasons, but I just don't need to worry about this, and I don't need to follow this kind of urgent path. I can just not do that. So I let that feeling of urgency just kind of wash over me, and after it kind of passed, I said, you know, I would really like to wake up in the morning with some new ideas about what to do, some, some new solutions. You know, that would be really, really cool. So I went to bed Sunday night. I woke up Monday morning, and this is absolutely true. I woke up Monday morning and I had 2 emails in my inbox from friends of mine. One had written the email at 6 in the morning, and she sent it to me and said, I woke up this morning with a fantastic idea about your business. Can we talk today? So that was funny. And then another email was from a friend of mine who had a brilliant idea about another business opportunity that we could pursue. And I cracked up because I was like, okay, I asked for some new ideas, but that doesn't mean that I guess that they have to be my own. And that's kind of what I was referring to earlier when I said that sometimes problems can get solved without us even intervening. And I'm not all about this law of attraction. I don't even really understand what that is. But what I, what I am interested in looking at is that when I am able to be in this clear space, that's really our default. When I'm able to, you know, just say, I don't really want to be stressed about this, it's really not necessary. And I kind of fall back into that beautiful, clear spaciousness. The opportunities that may have been in front of me all along become more apparent. That's how it seems to me. In the past, if I had gone to bed all worked up, I might have woken up the next day and seen those emails and thought, I can't do that. I mean, I don't want to, you know, go down that road. That just doesn't seem like a good solution. I might have been in that kind of space. But because I wasn't, because I'd already said, you know, I'm open to, to things, to new ideas here, and I'm not going to keep going on this merry-go-round that I'm on, those opportunities that came into my inbox looked like something I wanted to answer and maybe say yes to. So the work of solving problems doesn't have to be all on our shoulders. And when we are able to say a gentle no to that urgent stressful thinking, and realize that we have at our disposal an infinite number of possible solutions, whether they come from us or they come from other people, it's a lot easier to live in a state of ease instead of a state of distress. So I'm going to pause there for just a moment and see if anybody has any comments or questions for me. Kathy, can you touch on how this applies to a habit or addiction like quitting smoking, as Gavin mentioned? Yes, absolutely. So it seems to me that habits and addictions are a function of a couple of things. And this is not my area of expertise, but this is the way that it has started to look to me over the past couple of years. It seems to me that they're pretty similar in that they are being used as an escape from a feeling. So let's say we're having a stressed out sort of feeling. We might reach for a substance of some kind to try to help ease that feeling, and that is simply a misunderstanding of where that feeling is coming from, A, and how that feeling will come and go. So if we understand that any feeling we've got is coming from momentary thinking, A, and B, we know that thoughts are designed to change and move through us if we just kind of let the system do its thing, then we don't need to respond or react to those kinds of thoughts. We can simply sit with them, allow the feeling to be there, not really worry about it because we know it's coming from a momentary thought. It comes through and moves along, and then the urgency to make it stop is not present anymore. I think that I— well, I never had any issues with addiction or anything like that before I came across these principles. I was really suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. And I'm actually kind of surprised that I wasn't reaching for food or alcohol or whatever it might've been to try to ease that. I wasn't doing that. But a lot of people do. A lot of people try to ease their own suffering by using something, whether it's smoking or shopping, to try to make themselves feel better. But the truth of the matter is that that's like, you know, going to see the dentist when you have a broken leg. The two things are not connected. There's no way that food or a cigarette or alcohol is really going to have any effect on our feelings because our feelings aren't coming from anything out here. They're coming from just momentary thinking. That if we can learn to just sit with it and not worry about whatever that sensation is, it will move along because that's what it's designed to do. So, um, to me it seems like the way to break those habits is to simply see that that's what's happening, and that the beauty of the way human beings are designed is that our natural setting is one of calm and and clarity and peace. And all we have to do is kind of wait out a feeling that we might not like for the moment, but it will pass because that's what we're designed to do. And that's what I saw for myself. That was how my symptoms of PTSD ended very quickly because I just saw that I didn't have to worry about it, that it would move along on its own. Lynn is asking, how much of life is in our control? How much do we plan or direct our life? Do we set intentions and then let go, or do we wait in silence for fresh ideas? Wow, what a rich question. This is how it looks to me after being in this conversation now for a couple of years. It looks to me like we have almost no control over life, life with a capital L, but what we can do control in a way is our experience of it. And the way we can control— and I'm using control in quotes— that is through this understanding. It's through seeing that my experience is being generated from within myself, and that is ultimately completely freeing. And as a result, it allows me to do the things that I want to do. It allows me to set a goal knowing that ultimately whether I hit that goal or not is immaterial because I already have everything. We all already have everything. We are everything, and our security and well-being and all of those beautiful things are already ours. They're not something we have to go and get somewhere. They're not something we can ever lose, and we've never lost them, even if it's looked like we've lost them. And so with that as a foundation, you're free to live your life and do the things that you want to do, because there's no outcome that has to happen for you to have a great life, if that makes sense. So I used to think that the peace that I was after was something that I had to go and find somewhere. And so I tried to set goals that would get me there. When I realized in a big way that I was the source of peace, then it was like, oh wow, okay, I already have peace and happiness and all these things just by being here, just by being human. Then what do I really want to do with my time? Like, what would be fun? Because I'm not risking anything. I already have everything. So now what do I want to go do? So it really is the most freeing possible thing is to realize that there's nothing we have to go and seek anymore. That we already have it. So now it's more like goal setting can be like a game and fun. And I might add, Lynn, that a lot of the goals that I've set in the past couple of years since I came across this understanding of these principles, um, have, have happened but in really weird ways. And then they've had all these twists and turns attached to them and And I've just ridden it out and just said, wow, you know, this is pretty interesting, this life we're living. And I find that I say yes a lot more often to things that come my way. And I'm not afraid to say yes to things because there's no need to be afraid because there's nothing to lose. Anybody else have any comments? Or questions. I've really enjoyed this discussion, and I really like this topic because I find that people spend an inordinate amount of time focusing in on their problems in life. And I'll, I'll leave you, um, with, in this particular discussion, with something I heard a couple of months ago I was at a conference and I heard Linda Pransky talking about her early relationship with her husband, George Pransky, and how they had a lot of problems. And Linda was saying in this presentation that at one point she went to talk privately with Sidney Banks, who was the person who originally described these three principles. And she went to him and said, Sid, you know, I've got a big problem. You know, George and I are not getting along. We're thinking of splitting up, and I just don't know what to do anymore. It just seems like a dead end. You know, what do I do with this? What do I do? And she said in this presentation, she said, you know, Sid said to me, well, Linda, was there ever a time where things were good between you and George and you had really good feelings and you know, everything was really nice and your feelings towards George were very warm and loving and friendly. And she said, well, of course, that's why we got together in the first place. And Sid's response was, well, then do more of that. And the reason I love that so much is because it's pointing to what I've been trying to convey in this presentation, which is that if we are going towards the stressful, you know, urgent, gotta do it now, gotta fix this now, that's not where the answer is. You know, Sydney Banks always says it's in the feeling, and other Three Principles people say it's in the feeling. And now I really understand what that means. It's in the good feeling It's in the feeling of freedom. It's in the feeling of possibility and opportunity. That's where the answers are, and that's where real life is. And if we keep going down the rabbit hole of stress and, you know, trying to solve things and feeling very tightly wound and like we're gripping life like this, we're never really going to have that freedom feeling that is our birthright, and it's where the solutions are. So before I close, really, really quickly, I have one last thing to say on that. I do have a couple of classes. Thank you, Lynn. I do have a couple of classes coming up in the Mind Yoga Academy. If you are interested in them, they're at www.mindyogaacademy.com. One starts this Saturday. It's a week-long class about solving a big life problem. It's called Breakthrough and Break Free, and I just concluded the first run of that class and had a wonderful time with the people in there. It's just a one-week class where we meet live in conversation two Saturdays, and we have a discussion in between. I have another class starting next Thursday the 28th that is called Relationship Rescue, and that is a 2-hour live call, and then you have 1 week of personalized email coaching from me. And lastly, I added a pre-recorded class into the Academy that also relates to what we were just talking about called What Would You Do If You Were Truly Free? And that talks a lot about how to access this innate freedom that is present for all of us and where it can lead. So just really quick in closing, I will leave you with this thought as well, which is that you have the answer already. Whatever the problem looks like for you today, and however real it feels to you, and I do understand that it feels very real, you already have the answer to it. And the only thing that is keeping you from seeing it is occasionally you've got some thinking going on that's telling you that this is something that's got to be fixed right now, that it's this big problem and it's kind of clouding over your vision. And as soon as you see that that's what's going on, that there's just something clouding your vision, it starts to clear away. And in that space is where your answer is. And that space is you. That space is you. Anybody else have any closing questions or comments before I, I end this for today? Thank you. Thank you, Dawn, Kathy. I really appreciate you being here. And there will be a replay sent out as well if you'd like to watch this again. And Thank you, Lynn. I really enjoyed having you guys here. And you know, I'm available to you if you need to get in touch with me. Feel free to email me anytime or find me on Facebook in the Mind Yoga Spa where I hang out all day long. So thank you very much for being here. And if you're watching the replay, thank you for watching. Thanks, Gavin. Bye-bye now, everybody. Talk to you again soon.
