There are two basic approaches to seeking peace: getting what you want and wanting what you get. The first is chasing peace. The second is finding it. The breakthrough is moving from the first approach to the second. 

The role of fear is especially relevant in neuroplastic healing. If the brain comes to believe that something harmless is dangerous, that belief causes fear that can create or contribute to pain and illness.

The challenge of change is not… about becoming more courageous; it’s about becoming more fearless. When the fear subsides… we do things we’ve never done before because the fear that hemmed us in is gone, or reduced. The loss of fear is the mark of change, and the proof of change is what’s happening when we’re not trying.   

The self-image model of happiness… consists of three actions: (1) cultivating a self-image or story that gives us feelings of love and belonging and meaning and purpose, (2) getting the important people in our lives to tell that story about us, and (3) trying to embody that story more fully. When we’re able to manage these three tasks, we’re happy. When we’re struggling to manage them, we’re anxious. When we fail to manage them, we fall into depression or addiction or illness.  

... it’s surprising to me how people and events can still affect my mood by affirming or challenging my story and the beliefs that make it up. Without ever planning it or consciously choosing it, I tied my happiness to a story of who I am. If someone contradicts my story, I get angry. If someone honors and affirms my story, I respond with the false grace of an addict who just got a fix. 

When we’re in the process of breakdown, there are actually three related things that are breaking down: (1) Our self-image is breaking down—as the evidence mounts that we’re not everything we say we are; (2) our body is breaking down—from the strain of defending and promoting the self-image; and (3) the self-image strategy for happiness is breaking down—the strategy that says the best way to be happy is to try to become who we want to be in the world…

Whether we’re losing the battle to fulfill our self-image or exhausting ourselves in trying to win it, we all break down. But we don’t always break through. This book is about flipping breakdowns into breakthroughs by surrendering the self-image that once was moving us forward, but now is holding us back.  

I changed my story. That is what self-directed neuroplasticity makes possible. We don’t have to fulfill the story, prove the story, insist on the story, or be a servant of the story: we can edit the story—and not just by adding new thoughts to outshout the old thoughts but by editing, even deleting, the old thoughts that tell us “This is who I am. This is what I need to have. This is how things have to be.”

A key measure of breakdown is “Do I feel broken down?” Am I exhausting myself to produce what I do because it would humiliate me to produce anything less? Is my self-image, in other words, turning into an abusive boss?

Some people don’t feel comfortable talking about the unconscious. But whether we use the words unconscious or nonconscious, or subconscious, or semiconscious—whether we talk about repressing our feelings, or suppressing them, or shoving them down, or holding them in—it doesn’t really matter. In any language, in any approach, bringing out the things we’re hiding is healing.

One purpose of working like an addict was to keep me from feeling guilt. But if I’m okay with feeling guilt, I don’t have to work like an addict. I can say: “I’m feeling guilty about wanting to strangle my father... Now let me see what’s on TV.”

My friend had once said to me, “Maybe you should go to a therapist and see if you can find out why you need to be so special and why you always need to be improving.” She was wise enough to see that the two were related—and that a passion for self-improvement isn’t always a sign of health or a path to happiness.

I naively focus on the workload and the timelines and the deadlines and the task lists, thinking that the only way to feel better is to get it all done, instead of seeing that the way to feel better is to feel the feelings I’m doing all the work to avoid.

As I think back on the times I felt angry with people, it’s obvious that I was angry because they interfered with my self-image and my story of myself. People don’t even have to know me to inspire my anger. They just have to interfere with my story, which is my sacred plan for who I want to be and how I want the world to behave.

We invent our self-image and our stories as a form of refuge from the pain of life. They are carefully constructed to be soothing. When we reach for “alternative facts,” we’re looking for the facts that support a soothing story of ourselves. That’s why “rational” debate does so little to change our minds. Because we cannot be persuaded to drop our story if it returns us to the pain we adopted the story to escape.

For most of my adult life, I never actually saw my self-image… I was embedded in perfectionism without seeing the cause of the perfectionism or what it was I was trying to perfect. And, consequently, I didn’t see that my perpetual state of anxiety was something I was contributing to.

It’s hard to know how needy I am until I’m not getting what I need. I had no idea that my happiness was tied to my story of who I was; that I needed an environment to support that story; and that I had left that environment behind, back in the United States, in college.

When the arrogance gets beaten out of us, grace can flow into us.  “Grace” is goodness that we didn’t plan or earn. It just happens for us. It’s not a result of our actions; it’s often a result of the failure of our actions, when, beyond all planning, a door opens, the phone rings, an insight comes, a person appears, grace flows.

Grace is… the final state of breakdown. It may be puzzling to think of grace as a state of breakdown, but we have to remember what is breaking down. It is the false self that is breaking down. It is grace that is breaking through.

The exercises I was doing to challenge false beliefs about my health took down other false beliefs with them. I didn’t notice this at first. I just noticed that I was feeling a lot better. I was feeling more joy than I’d ever felt. I was laughing more than I’d ever laughed. And I was becoming convinced that self-directed neuroplasticity was spiritual practice.

We know that a sense of danger in the brain can lead to insomnia or anxiety, Schubiner says. But it’s less known that an activated danger signal in the brain can also create back pain, fatigue, diarrhea, stomach pain, urinary frequency, migraine, pelvic pain, and the inability to concentrate or think clearly. That’s why a mind-body approach that reduces the sense of danger can treat all these ailments.

The people who are most susceptible to these mind-body symptoms, says Schubiner, tend to be those who try hard, care what others think, want to be good, and want to be liked. They tend to not stand up for themselves, and they tend to suppress their anger.

If I’m trying to avoid a feeling that “I will do anything not to feel,” I’m going to create a lot of suffering for myself. And I do not know—until someone wakes me up-how much easier and wiser it is to feel the feelings I’m avoiding than to do the crazy things I’m doing to avoid those feelings.

The healing power of neuroplasticity lies in the insight that pain and illness can start in the brain, and if we change our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings by changing how we respond to them, we can heal pain and illness. If we continue to believe and obey the thoughts and instructions that hide our secrets and suppress our feelings, we will keep suffering.

When I began to find a way to bring up the emotions I’d been shoving down and face the avoided feelings directly, the thoughts became quiet. It’s as if the chatter were a side effect of shoving down the feeling—or maybe the thinking was a device to keep me from facing the feeling. Either way, it seems that when I can face those feelings directly, my obsessive thoughts lose their purpose and begin to fade, which leaves my mind still.

The pattern is universal for breakthroughs large or small: a feeling comes up, unfamiliar, frightening—either we resist it, shove it down, and try to remain who we were, or we receive it, take it in, and become something new.

In stillness, it is thought that is still. I hear the sound of my footsteps without listening for them. I hear the sound of my pen on the page. It prompts me to wonder: Where is beauty? Is it in the song of the bird—or in the mind that’s quiet enough to hear it?

So, if a mark of peace is the stillness of thought, what makes thought still? I believe that the answer—and the action that underlies every practice of profound healing I’ve seen—is bringing up the things we’ve been hiding. To do this, we need to question the thoughts we’ve been believing and face the feelings we’ve been avoiding.

Feelings are never the problem—resisting our feelings is the problem. And the self-image is the fortress of resistance. We created the self-image to resist the feelings that cause us fear, and we can’t dismantle the self-image until we master that fear.