I used to be a queen of stinking thinking.
For decades, I had a pattern. I’d feel threatened by somebody or some situation, and I’d ruminate on it non-stop.
Mentally, I’d be running scenarios. Trying to figure them out. Trying to understand them. Trying to crack the code of why this person said this, or why that situation unfolded that way, or what I should have done differently.
Hours. Days. Sometimes weeks.
The cycle was always the same: ruminate, agitate, despair, then reach for something to self-medicate the agitation. Food. Wine. Television. Hours on the phone going over the same things again and again.
What I’ve come to understand is this: trying to figure things out is an ego pattern.
The ego cannot understand things. The ego is not a thought pattern of truth. So when we’re trying to “figure it out” with the ego, we’re never going to arrive.
We’re going to keep going in circles. Because that’s what the ego does, it generates more questions, more analysis, more confusion.
We’re not getting any closer to clarity. We’re just recycling toxic waste into more toxicity.
Here’s what made a real difference for me:
I started to notice the urge to figure things out as a signal. Not as a productive activity, but as an alarm. The alarm says: I’m hooked into the ego thought system right now.
I no longer try to figure things out like that. Instead, I ask a different question:
“Higher Holy Spirit Self, I’d like to know what’s the most loving choice here. I’d like to be guided. I don’t need to understand. I just need to be willing.”
And the answer always comes. Sometimes as a clear thought. Sometimes as a quiet knowing. Sometimes as a peace that settles in even when nothing has changed.
This is the alternative to stinking thinking.
Trust replaces analysis.
Willingness replaces willpower.
We learn to recognize the ego’s analysis loop and go the other way.
If you’d like to step out of the stinking thinking, please join my Healing Religious Guilt Deep Dive Workshop TOMORROW Saturday, May 16.
We are SO BLESSED to get to find the easier path and get off the hamster wheel of repeating the pain!
SATURDAY: This week, I’d like to invite us into this work together. My Healing Religious Guilt Deep Dive Workshop is this Saturday, May 16. Many of us are carrying religious guilt we don’t even recognize as religious guilt. It’s just woven into our sense of being “not good enough.”
New Series: Change Your Mind About the World – with Alan Cohen, James Twyman, Michael Mirdad and Lisa Natoli – early-bird bonuses until May 22nd. Click here for more info.
NEW PODCAST EPISODE: I Wrote the Script What if waking up doesn’t have to hurt? This week I’m continuing in one of the most foundational sections of A Course in Miracles – “The Dreamer of the Dream” – and we’re turning from diagnosis to medicine. Why do so many of us secretly dread real spiritual awakening, afraid it would cost us everything? What’s the quieter dream I’ve come to trust the Holy Spirit gives us first, before the bigger waking? And what’s the single question I now ask myself that changed how I meet every painful moment? This is part two of a two-episode arc. Listen with me on Episode 738.
If you’re carrying religious guilt – whether from how you were raised, from past lives spent in churches and orders, or from a wound you can’t quite name – join me for my Recovering from Religious Guilt Deep Dive Workshop This Saturday, May 16. God doesn’t punish us. We do. And we can stop. Let’s lay this down together. 🩷 Register at PowerofLoveMinistry.net/Religious
